
JL^M 



Class 

Book, f!^l l^h 



Jfy 



Copyright^. 



CDFYRIGWr DEPOSITi 



By STANLEY WASHBURN 

Trails, Trappers, and Tender -Feet 

in the New Empire of We^ern Canada 

With 80 illustrations from the 
author's photographs. $3.00 net. 

"This is a book of wilderness travel 
and adventure, of old trappers and 
callow tenderfeet, of gifted guides and 
wonderful pack horses, of scaling snowy 
passes and floundering through miry 
muskegs, of watching splendid sunsets 
and escaping from forest fires — all that 
goes to stir a passionate love of the 
wilderness in the heart of normal man." 
—Chicago Record-Herald. 

"Every chapter possesses a fascina- 
tion for those who delight in the life 
out of doors . . . has much to say of 
the gigantic operations of the Grand 
Trunk Pacific in clearing a way through 
the wilderness and opening up a vast 
empire for settlement."— ^aj/6>« Tran- 
script. 

"Elegantly printed and bound .... 
beautifully illustrated." — Hartford 
Courant. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 







■? n 



Nogi Mounted on the White Horse Presented by Stoessel when 
Port Arthur Fell. [See page 10.] 



N O G I 

A MAN AGAINST THE BACKGROUND 
OF A GREAT WAR 



BY 
STANLEY WASHBURN 

Author of *'The Cable Game" and "Trails, Trappers, 
and Tender-Feet in Western Canada" 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1913 



-fc^fc*^ 






COPTBIGHT, 1913, 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
Published February, 1913 



THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS 
RAHWAY, N. J. 



//±? 



i)CI.A382598 
1*. . 



MY MOTHER 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Nogi Mounted on the White Horse Presented y 

by Stoessel when Port Arthur Fell . . Frontispiece ^ 

PAGE 

Death on the Way to the Hospital. A Study in 
Oriental Expression 7 ^ 

" The Village Where Nogi Lived at Port Arthur Was 

Well Within the Range of the Russian Big Guns " . 19 ^ 

The Daily Quota of a Nation's Sacrifice to Gain Port 
Arthur 25 " 

" And Ever with the Advance Crept the Field Wire " . 32 v 

A Cavalry Escort with Japanese Transport Train . 42 ^^ 

"All Forthwith Settled Down to Intrench and Throw 
Up Gun Positions" 52 

Every Village in Manchuria that Summer Was Loop- / 

holed for Rifle and Artillery Fire 59 " 

Enter Almost Any Compound in the Town and One 
Would Stumble Across the Neatly Stacked Pyramids 
of the Modern Rifles of Japan 63 

Nogi Leaving His Headquarters in Fakumen ... 74 

Beef Being Driven into Fakumen for the Third Army 
Corps 84 

Japanese Wrestlers at Fakumen 99 

Every Road Was Choked with Troops Moving to the 
Front 108 

" We Were Told that the Soldiers Were Working Like 
Demons on Trenches and Advanced Gun Positions" 114 

"We Watched the Soldiers of the Eleventh Division 
Pouring Northward, Regiment after Regiment" . 121 

The Last Outpost of Japan— the Mongolian Frontier . 130 ^ 



NOGI 

A MAN AGAINST THE BACKGROUND 
OF A GREAT WAR 

CHAPTER I 

/^NCE in a generation or two there 
^— ^ lives a man whose greatest contribu- 
tion to his time is not the great things he 
did, but rather what he was himself. For 
the first few decades after his death he is 
known for his deeds, but as the years 
slip away the time may come when the 
deeds themselves are glorified by their 
association with the man, whose character 
and its potent lesson are living forces long 
after the men he led, if he was a soldier, 
have moldered in their graves and the 
cities that he stormed and captured have 
crumbled into dust. Such a man was 
General Baron Nogi, the old Japanese 
Samurai, soldier and patriot, who in Sep- 



2 NOGI 

tember, 1912, on the death of his Imperial 
Master, the Emperor of Japan, chose to 
pass the keen edge of his sword across his 
throat rather than hve longer in a world 
from which had been taken the object 
around which the loyalty and ideals of a 
lifetime had been fondly twined. 

To the world at large and to Japan 
especially, Nogi has been known and ad- 
mired as the general who captured Port 
Arthur and turned the Russian right at 
Moukden, thereby ending that terrific bat- 
tle in the rout of Kuropatkin. To the 
student of military matters Nogi and his 
deeds constitute a chapter in the science 
and the art of war. To Japan the man 
has now become more than a mere national 
hero; he is already a tradition which prom- 
ises to live in Japanese history long after 
the details of his achievements have grown 
to be vague and indistinct memories in 
the public mind. And this will happen, 
not merely because Nogi so mourned his 



NOGI 8 

Emperor that he elected to kill himself, 
but because in this single act of devotion 
was emphasized the habit of mind of a 
lifetime of self-effacement and of imper- 
sonal striving for the realization of an 
ideal. Nogi's life exemplified that subtle, 
half-defined instinct which is so definite 
and potent an influence in the Japanese 
character — the tendency to merge the 
personal in the ideal. He was the con- 
sistent embodiment of that idea of the Bud- 
dhist religion which leads each soul to pray 
for ultimate absorption into Nirvana, the 
intangible Divine. Nogi, in his personal 
character and in his whole life, was the 
exemplification of this idea, and his death 
was a vindication of it, for all the nation 
to see and realize. A few old men, such 
as Nogi, Oyama, Ito and their contem- 
poraries, made modern Japan possible. 
With ideals unsmirched by personal am- 
bitions, they were able to combine the 
human assets of the almost Spartan man- 



4 NOGI 

hood of the Japanese, its simplicity and 
semi-fanatical worship of national ideals, 
reaching back to feudal times, with all 
of the arts and sciences of the modern 
Western world. This combination of 
most of the best elements of two different 
civilizations was hard to surpass. 

The Army, for example, represented the 
union of all the simple characteristics 
which made the ancient Greeks invincible, 
with the knowledge of the very latest 
practice and equipment in the art of war. 

Inasmuch as Nogi, both in his life and 
in his death, stands now and will probably 
always stand for the peculiar type of man 
that made the greatness of New Japan 
ipossible, it has seemed worth while to 
write this sketch. It is not my aim to 
attempt, even in the briefest way, a biog- 
raphy of Nogi. Much less is it my desire 
to write what might be viewed as a tenta- 
tive contribution to military history. What 
I wish to do is to paint, as best I may, 



NOGI 5 

the picture of a man against the back- 
ground of a war. To know and appre- 
ciate Nogi and to realize the workings 
of his mind and character (if indeed one 
may ever even attempt to know the true 
mind or character of a Japanese), one 
must dwell at least briefly on the great 
war. I shall not speak of the General's 
youth, his life as a young man, his record 
in the Chinese war, or, in fact, of any- 
thing prior to 1904, for of these matters 
I know only what other writers and wiser 
historians have told. Of Nogi in the great 
struggle I know somewhat, for it was my 
privilege to be attached to his staff as war 
correspondent for an American paper, 
both at Port Arthur and later in the 
North when his army had moved to the 
Mongolian frontier on the extreme Japa- 
nese left. What I knew and saw of Nogi 
inspired in me the most intense admiration 
for his character and for his genius. He 
represents the most consistent idealist I 



6 NOGI 

ever knew. That he was a great soldier, 
the world knows. His private and per- 
sonal side, that sweet and simple gentle- 
ness, that winning kindliness which equaled 
in its appeal the tenderness of a woman, 
is I beheve little known in this country, 
and is appreciated not at all. To know 
the man one must have seen him in both 
aspects, as the iron soldier and as the 
gentle friend. In both these roles a few 
of us knew him. If I dwell a little upon 
Port Arthur and Manchuria, it is not 
because of them, but because it was through 
and on account of them that I came to 
know the General. To Nogi, Port Arthur 
was a scar, and Moukden a wound re- 
opened. In the war we trace the develop- 
ment of his character, and in the pathos 
and tragedy of those cruel days of blood 
and sacrifice we learn to understand the 
workings of the mind that prompted Gen- 
eral Nogi to act as he did when his Im- 
perial Master died. 



CHAPTER II 

"ITS rHEN the grand plan of the cam- 
^ ^ paign against Russia was mapped 
out in the War Office in Tokio years before 
the struggle, the prospective military op- 
erations were divided into two great parts, 
Port Arthur and the movements in Korea 
and Northern Manchuria. The latter were 
in reality but one campaign, for though 
the program was launched in two parts, 
the strategy matured at Liaoyang as 
a single stroke. Port Arthur itself rep- 
resented to the Japanese a galling wound 
that rankled deeply in their national pride. 
They had taken it from the Chinese in a 
short and exhausting campaign in 1894, 
and then they beheld the fruits of their 
victory swallowed up by Russian intrigue 
almost before the smoke of battle had fairly 
cleared away. From the time, a few years 

7 



8 NOGI 

later, that the Muscovite entered Port 
Arthur, " temporarily " as it was at first 
given out, the Russo-Japanese war was an 
inevitable conflict. For almost a decade 
the Japanese were straining every nerve 
in preparation for the war that was to 
wipe out the chagrin they had felt when 
Russia stepped in, and, without a blow, ap- 
propriated to herself the prize of 1894. To 
the military experts in Tokio, planning and 
organizing and burning the midnight oil, 
it was well known that the capture of 
Port Arthur presented immense difficul- 
ties. Their army of spies sown throughout 
Manchuria took good care to keep them 
posted as to what the hated Russians were 
doing on the tip of the Liaotung Penin- 
sula. Next to Gibraltar, Port Arthur rep- 
resented to the Japanese the most im- 
pregnable fortress that the busy hands of 
men ever threw up against a sky-line to 
block an attacking foe. This they knew 
long before they tried to solve the problem 



NOGI 9 

which the best engineers of Europe had 
declared to be a riddle with no answer 
other than death and defeat to the foe 
that presumed to storm the grisly heights. 
Every detail of the plan of investment and 
attack, it is said, was completed several 
years before the war; at the same time 
the leader was selected into whose hands 
should be intrusted the vindication of the 
national honor involved in the retaking 
of Port Arthur. 

The man was Nogi. 

The task to which he was assigned has 
no parallel in modern history. 

For many, many months before the strug- 
gle he had been aware of what was in store 
for him. He had himself commanded a 
brigade in 1894, when the fortress was 
taken from the Chinese, and none knew 
better than he the difficulties, now in- 
creased a hundred-fold by new defenses, 
that awaited him in Manchuria. When 
he left Japan to take upon his shoulders 



10 NOGI 

the burden of the great responsibility that 
had been assigned to him, his own life and 
personal interests were shed from him as 
one might drop a cloak. 

Nearly eighteen months after he had 
left Japan, I took an unusually fine pic- 
ture of the old man, mounted on the great 
white horse that captured Stoessel had 
presented him when Port Arthur finally 
fell. As the likeness was the best that I 
had seen, I sent the film back to my agent 
in Japan and instructed him to have it 
enlarged, colored, framed and presented to 
the Baroness Nogi, then living simply in 
her little house in Tokio. When she saw 
the picture, she held it at arm's length 
and as the tears, so hardly wrung from 
the Japanese, stole down her cheeks, she 
said, " This is the first direct personal touch 
that has come from my dear husband since 
the war started. When he parted with me 
to go to the ' front ' months and months 
ago, he said that as a husband he would 



NOGI 11 

be dead to me until the war was success- 
fully terminated, and that I would not 
hear from him before then, nor should I 
write him, for his life, his time, his 
thoughts belonged utterly to his sovereign 
and to his country; that there must be 
naught of personality to come betAveen. 
He has kept his word, for with the ex- 
ception of an occasional note asking for 
spurs, or new equipment, I have heard 
nothing." This, then, was the spirit that 
Nogi took with him to the " front " when 
he went to solve the riddle that had been 
laid before him as his portion. And even 
before the leader landed on the barren 
coast that was to mean so much misery to 
him, word was brought that one of his 
two sons, both young officers in the Army, 
had died on the hills of Nanshan pierced 
by a Russian bullet. Thus was the bitter- 
ness of his task emphasized even at its 
inception. 

The Japanese conception of Port Arthur 



12 NOGI 

as a military problem has always seemed 
to me a cruel fallacy, an error in analysis, 
which cost the lives of tens of thousands 
of young men, and broke the heart of the 
iron old warrior to whom its execution was 
intrusted. It seems worth wdiile to dwell 
a little on this, not as an attempt to con- 
tribute anything to the military history of 
that gory siege, but rather because it ex- 
plains, in a measure, the hideous burden 
that came to weigh more and more potently 
upon Nogi himself. Any commander sen- 
sible of responsibility and of the gravity 
of decisions which rush regiments of lives 
to destruction must mourn the losses which 
the execution of his commands entails. 
But war engenders a perspective wherein 
men justify sacrifices which bring success. 
It is the loss of life that follows an unsound 
plan, based on an erroneous estimate of 
the problem to be solved, that rends the 
heart of the man that gives the order, and 
there can be but faint consolation to the 



NOGI 13 

leader in the fact that he, like Nogi, was 
but the instrument in the execution of a 
program which the War Office staff at 
home had worked out. 

For ten years prior to the Japanese- 
Russian war, military writers, dwelling on 
the increased destructiveness of modern 
implements of war, had declared that the 
use of the bayonet and fighting at close 
ranges would be impossible. A Russian 
gentleman by the name of Bloch, in the 
later 90's, wrote a book in six volumes in 
which he proved (on paper) that war was 
an impossibility from the point of view 
both of economics and of destructiveness. 
So convincing was his " Future of War," 
as the work was called, that he was awarded 
the Nobel prize and was credited with 
having inspired the Czar to call the first 
Peace Congress at The Hague. The Japa- 
nese, however, had not forgotten the man- 
ner in which they, in a single day, took 
Port Arthur from the Chinese in 1894. 



14 NOGI 

Then, with the bayonet and in a series of 
spectacular assaults, they captured the 
pivotal fort, and the great fortress fell like 
a house of cards. In 1904 they faced the 
Russians on the same ground, though the 
defenses had been rebuilt almost through- 
out under the direction of the world's 
cleverest engineers. The plan worked out 
by the Japanese was based on the century- 
/ old theory that men were superior to mod- 
ern methods, and that, as always before, 
" cold steel " could surmount any obstacles 
that engineers might have reared to block 
an assaulting enemy's progress. The first 
act of the Port Arthur campaign on the 
heights of Nanshan should have taught 
the Japanese their error. Here across a 
narrow neck of land the Russians had 
built effective field fortifications. And here 
the Japanese should have learned their 
lesson. The first day they made their 
assault in great strength and over a narrow 
area, and they lost about three thousand 



NOGI 15 

men in three hours, among them Nogi's 
oldest son. Nothing daunted they re- 
peated their effort the second day, met 
but a feeble resistance and carried the 
works. In the eyes of the officers com- 
manding the army their theory that the 
Japanese bayonet was irresistible had been 
vindicated. But one vital point was over- 
looked. During the night following the 
first assault, a number of shallow draft 
gunboats of the Japanese navy had quietly 
steamed within range, and, while the 
columns of infantry were assaulting in 
front, the naval shells were bursting stead- 
ily on the Russian flank and rear. The 
position was untenable, and when the 
Japanese infantry came on later in the 
day, the Russians withdrew. Here, then, 
grew up the fallacy which caused the 
tragedy at Port Arthur. The naval offi- 
cers mildly intimated that their cooperation 
had made the second assault on Nanshan 
possible, but the Army scoffed at the idea. 



16 NOGI 

To them it was all due to their own 
impetuous assaults. The assistance of the 
Navy was but a detail. Thus it was that 
Nogi and his splendid army arrived at 
last before Port Arthur itself with the 
idea of " cold steel " unshaken in their 
minds. I never knew any one, Japanese 
or white, who pretended to know what 
Nogi really thought about Port Arthur. 
What he did we all know. Under the 
conventional fire of his artillery he ordered 
an assault with the bayonet on the line 
of forts that stood bleak and forbidding 
against the sky. To make this assault 
his infantry had to move, practically with- 
out protection, across an open valley. The 
distance was perhaps a mile on the av- 
erage. This was the plan which he had 
been ordered to execute, and without 
a tremor his men attempted the im- 
possible. For nearly a week, both by day 
and by night, his battalions, regiments and 
brigades dashed themselves in hopeless ef- 



NOGI 17 

fort against the impenetrable fortifications. 
Machine guns, shrapnel, shell and volleys 
of rifle-fire swept them down in droves, 
but again and again they came on and on 
and on. One battalion was reduced in a 
day from 1200 to seventeen effectives and 
one officer. In their minds the idea of 
ultimate victory through their method had 
been implanted at Port Arthur ten years 
before and had been strengthened at Nan- 
shan a few weeks earlier, and they would 
not accept the inevitable. In all that 
hideous week there was neither hesitation 
nor faltering among men or among officers. 
No one knows what they lost. Certainly 
25,000 fell and perhaps 40,000. The net 
result was the occupation at the end of 
the week of one position, and even that 
not one which possessed great strategic 
value. This, then, was the first great bur- 
den that fell upon Nogi. He had put to 
the test the program which he had been 
ordered to execute. A bleeding and shat- 



18 NOGI 

tered army with utter disillusionment as 
to Port Arthur was the result. For weeks 
before that tickets had been sold in Yoko- 
hama and Tokio for a grand entertainment 
to celebrate the fall of Port Arthur. Cer- 
tain signals had been widely advertised 
whereby the Japanese people might be in- 
formed of the great event, the date of 
which had actually been announced. It 
reminded one not a little of the arrange- 
ments made by some of our great dailies 
to announce election returns. But after 
the failure of the August attacks, the 
tickets were called in, decorations were 
taken down, and a sobered Japan settled 
down dazed and stunned, but not dismayed, 
to await the further developments of the 
siege. 



CHAPTER III 

NOGI all this time was living quietly 
in a little hut of mud and stone from 
which Chinese, pigs, chickens and the mis- 
cellany which composes a Manchurian 
family had been turned out. The little 
village of a score or more of similar 
houses was well within the range of the 
Russian guns, and might have been an- 
nihilated if the enemy had but known it. 
Many and many a time their big shells 
burst fully a mile in the rear of the com- 
mander's dwelling place, and once a big 
ten-inch shell fell within a few hundred 
yards of the house itself, spattering men 
and horses about like fragments of a shat- 
tered egg. To us he seemed always the 
same in those days. A quiet, self-contained 
man, a little large perhaps for a Japanese, 
with close-shaven head and a dark beard, 

19 



20 NOGI 

which grizzled perceptibly during those 
days of blood and chaos. Long years of 
campaigning with his troops and of out- 
of-door life had turned his skin to a dark 
brown parchment. The eyes were deep- 
set, unfathomable, and as variable in their 
expression as is the range of the human 
emotions. When he talked to us, they were 
mild, polite and non-committal. When he 
gave orders to his staff or to his orderlies, 
the pupils would contract to mere points 
of steel, and the whole aspect of his face 
would suggest the soldier, the mere ma- 
chine of war, without personality or emo- 
tions. The next moment he might turn 
to us with a change as complete as that 
from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde, and in his 
well-modulated voice and with the mild 
politeness and formality of a host, he 
would resume the commonplaces of the 
conversation in which he might have been 
engaged. At Port Arthur we saw little 
of his gentle, kindly, almost paternal side. 



NOGI 21 

the side we came to know so well the 
following year in Northern Manchuria. 
Night and day at Port Arthur his mind 
was on the great problem that lay before 
him, every effort to solve which seemed 
only to result in dead, dying and mangled 
bodies. Of the losses I never heard him 
speak at Port Arthur, but that the daily 
roll of killed and wounded that came to 
him each morning cut him deeper and 
deeper none could doubt. During those 
dreadful days which dragged along, week 
after week, month after month, he changed 
greatly. Heavy furrows of care and 
worry seamed his face, and when it was in 
repose deep new lines stood revealed like 
scars. Many of the Japanese, especially 
of the younger school, felt but a modicum 
of sympathy for the dead and the wounded. 
With Nogi I think it was quite different. 
As a young general he had organized the 
Ninth Division, and it was said that he 
knew by name every officer in its ranks. 



22 NOGI 

That division was the child which he him- 
self had raised and for many years had 
commanded. It formed the center of his 
army at Port Arthur and saw perhaps the 
hardest and bitterest fighting of any divi- 
sion in the entire war. I was told by one 
of its officers that it was recruited during 
the war two and one-half times, while of 
the officers of the line there were hardly 
a dozen that served through the campaign 
from end to end. Every time there was 
hard fighting, the Ninth submitted almost 
without exception the largest list of cas- 
ualties, and in every such list that Nogi 
read were the names of friends whom he, 
as a commander, had trained and disci- 
plined to their appointed task. To a man 
who felt the loss of each soldier as a per- 
sonal bereavement the Port Arthur cam- 
paign brought bitterness beyond compare. 
During that week of the first great assault 
in August, Nogi was ever at the " front," 
stationed now on one hill and now on 



NOGI 23 

another, watching his battaHons, regiments 
and brigades dissolving before the Russian 
fire like mist before the sunshine. Yet 
day after day he kept them at it. The 
plan was not his, but he assumed the re- 
sponsibility of it, and with a stoicism that 
a thousand years in history past cannot 
duplicate, he fed the cavernous maw of 
war with the best blood of Japan. 

And the soldiers themselves, they that 
were called upon to give and give freely, 
accepted their lot with the same stoicism 
as did he who sent them to their doom. 
Never, I think, did any of them in word 
or thought question the commands of the 
silent man by whose orders they offered 
their lives on the altar of their duty and 
of their nation. Between Nogi and his 
men there seemed to be, on their part, a 
curious blending of love, respect and rever- 
ence which engendered a willingness to go 
to the last gasp with an eagerness that 
bordered on fanaticism. When he passed, 



24 NOGI 

each and every soldier would grow rigid 
with respectful attention, with only their 
eyes, which followed him as a dog its 
master, to distinguish them from graven 
statues. When he went abroad with his 
staff there seemed always an aloofness be- 
tween him and them. He walked in ad- 
vance, not consciously, I think, but because 
his officers fell back as from a man marked 
out as above and different from them. 
When they spoke among themselves, it 
was in modulated voices, as people speak 
in a sick-room or in the presence of death. 
Again and again have I seen him in the 
morning leave his little mud headquarters 
to ride to the front for the inspection of 
some new phase of the progress of the 
siege, and always, as my mind brings back 
the image of him, the picture is the same. 
With him there was little of the pomp 
and ostentation of military trappings that 
distinguish soldiers of high rank in foreign 
armies. His dress never varied; high 




o 



o 









c3 

S3 
O 

4-> 
O 

Q 



NOGI 25 

cavalry boots over white moleskin trousers, 
that grew grayer and grayer as the siege 
advanced, and a dark blue tunic, almost 
black, with the three stars and three 
stripes on the sleeves that denoted his 
rank. He would come walking slowly 
from his house, seemingly lost in thought, 
with spurs ringing metallically on the stone 
flagging and saber dragging clamorously 
at his side. A pace or two behind him 
followed his quiet and subdued aides. At 
the wooden-linteled outer gate of the com- 
pound the sentry stood with rifle presented, 
as motionless as though cast from steel, 
while silently and slowly the General 
mounted his horse and rode off down the 
road that led to the front. Once in a 
great while he would invite the correspond- 
ents to take tea or refreshments at his head- 
quarters, and there occasionally in the late 
fall afternoons we would find him, sitting 
under a tree at the head of a rough table, 
with maps spread out before him. These 



26 NOGI 

he would study through a great lens that 
magnified the details of the finely traced 
terrain on which the great puzzle was being 
worked out to the roar of a thousand guns 
and the sobbing groans of dying men. 
Inch by inch he would move the lens across 
the map, halting occasionally for minutes 
at a time as he would scrutinize every de- 
tail of some new trench captured or re- 
doubt to be stormed. But always when 
we would appear, the intensity, and the 
anguish of worry over success belated and 
victory long overdue, would fade from his 
face, and he would greet us as casually as 
he might have done had the reception been 
one planned to take place in his own home 
in Tokio. At a crisp word to an orderly, 
the maps would disappear and tea or saki 
(the Japanese drink, something like sherry 
in taste) would be brought in, and then 
for perhaps half an hour he would chat as 
unconcernedly as though there were not 
behind that iron mask the plan for an 



NOGI 27 

assault on the morrow that would cost 
untold lives to those even now crouching 
for the spring up yonder in the trenches. 
To his men and to his officers he was al- 
ways kind and conciliatory, but never un- 
der any circumstances familiar. When he 
spoke to them, he spoke curtly and they 
acted instantly. A moment's delay on 
their part and one sharp look, like the 
flash of a smoldering flame, would bring 
them to their feet in an instant with blood 
surging up beneath their skins. I never 
knew or saw a man whose eyes could in 
their glance speak death one instant and 
the next second be as placid and noncom- 
mittal as those of one who had no thought 
on earth but the passing of a pleasant and 
conventional moment. Many of his aides 
both at Port Arthur and later we knew 
and knew well, but never, so far as we 
could learn from them, did Nogi utter, 
under fatigue or distress of any kind, a sin- 
gle lament as to the portion of suffering 



28 NOGI 

that the siege entailed upon him. He 
looked on himself as a mere instrument. 
He was as impersonal with respect to his 
own misery, worries and anxieties as he 
was with respect to the lives of his men, 
when his better judgment deemed their 
sacrifice necessary. Perhaps deep down in 
that subtle and mysterious nature inherited 
from centuries of Samurai ancestors, he 
rejoiced at his own great burdens and 
sorrow as an offset to the suffering that 
his orders brought to others. Though he 
drove his troops to the limit both of 
courage and of endurance, yet he used 
himself likewise, and none could see his 
face and not believe that throughout the 
siege he bore, locked within his bosom, 
more real misery than did the soldiers who 
fell beneath the Russian bullets or lan- 
guished miserably in the hospitals of Man- 
churia, far from the peace and quiet of 
their simple Japanese homes. 



CHAPTER IV 

WITH the failure of the August as- 
saults on the sullen heights of the 
Russian stronghold came disillusionment 
as to the method of attack which must pre- 
vail if Port Arthur were to be taken from 
the Muscovites who sat stolid and deter- 
mined behind their hills crowned with ma- 
sonry and concrete and bristling with the 
latest inventions of man for the destruction 
of his species. Where dash and human 
courage and sacrifice had failed, there re- 
mained the skill of the engineer and the 
patient plodding endurance of the private 
soldier, who forthwith abandoned the sword 
and bayonet for the less spectacular but 
ultimately more potent weapon provided 
by the pick and shovel. The quarry as it 
were had " gone to earth," and it was for 
the hunter to dig him out. And so, al- 

29 



30 NOGI 

most with the same enthusiasm with which 
in August they had advanced over the 
shell-swept slopes, the soldiers settled 
down to mole their devious ways up under 
the Russian forts. The storming parties 
were not abandoned, but under the new 
program the distances to be traversed in 
the assault were reduced to the minimum. 
Trenches would be run well up under the 
point to be attacked, and when but a few 
hundred yards remained to be covered, the 
Japanese would swarm out of their pro- 
tected trenches and, under cover of artil- 
lery fire, sweep the Russians from the 
position. When they came to the more 
difficult places where forts of steel and 
concrete construction blocked their path- 
way, they drilled tunnels beneath the 
works, exploded mines, and assaulted 
through the breaches. But it is not my 
intention to discuss the hundred details, 
each a pitched battle in itself, which made 
up the remainder of the siege. Scarcely 



NOGI 31 

a day elapsed that on some point or an- 
other of the investment, where the miners 
had driven up within striking range of 
fort, trench or redoubt, there was not a 
sharp bit of fighting. Some days it would 
be but a battalion engaged, sometimes a 
regiment or brigade would be called in, 
and every month or so there would be a 
general movement forward, when the whole 
intrenching army would be engaged in a 
general advance. The losses each month 
were mounting higher and higher, but to 
offset them the Japanese could trace on 
their maps an advance of their lines that 
inch by inch, like some great malignant 
growth, was eating with its tendrils and 
fibers into the living tissue of the Russian 
stronghold. And with every important 
advance of the line of trenches and with 
each outlying position eaten away, came 
also a forward movement of the Japanese 
big guns. Month by month the fire and 
accuracy of these great engines became 



32 NOGI 

more and more deadly. With every ad- 
vance position taken by the Japanese bet- 
ter points of observation were obtained 
where the human range-finders of the heavy 
artillery, lying on their bellies or crouching 
in shallow trenches, could see just where 
the shells fired from guns two and three 
miles distant were doing their deadly ex- 
ecution. And ever with the advance crept 
the field wire. The position, which one hour 
was hidden by the smoke of bursting shells 
and strewn with the dead and dying, was 
the next a Japanese telephone station. In- 
deed, the stretcher bearers carrying off the 
wounded would meet the telegraph corps 
crawling forward, unwinding behind them 
that vital nerve of the armies' brain, the 
field telephone. As soon as the connec- 
tions were completed the man that a mo- 
ment before was crouching in the mud 
and dirt of some blood-stained ditch, with 
the dead of the afternoon fight still 
grouped about him in the fantastic pos- 




"And Ever with the Advance Crept the Field Wire" 



NOGI 33 

tures in which shell and ball had left them, 
would be speaking quietly into the portable 
telephone to the commander of some giant 
battery miles away. And thus each shell 
that was fired was checked as it sped to 
its destination. Though the men that fired 
the great mortars or naval howitzers were 
separated from their targets by two lines 
of hills, yet by the patient checking of the 
man in the advance trenches they were 
able slowly, surely, inch by inch, to perfect 
their sighting until great shells, the ex- 
plosions of which dug holes large enough 
for the foundations of small houses, were 
dropping through the very decks of the 
warships lying in the harbor four miles 
away. And with each new observation sta- 
tion the harassed fleet was obliged to shift 
its anchorage. Day by day and week by 
week the points of safety in the harbor 
grew fewer, until finally the last place 
where the ships were hidden from the pry- 
ing eyes of the range-finders had been 



34 NOGI 

reached. For the moment the Japanese 
were balked. From the many points they 
then occupied there was not one from 
which they could look into this last nook 
of refuge where lay the great gray hulls 
of the Russian fleet. Just at this time 
there came to us, fresh from Japan, a 
brand-new division, the Seventh. Thus far 
in the war they had seen no action. At 
home in Japan they had waited month 
after month for the hour that was to send 
them to the front to share in the glory and 
deeds of valor of their brothers who had 
gone out in other divisions. And they 
came to us, some fifteen to twenty thou- 
sand strong, clean-cut, eager and full of 
mettle. Marching up from Dalny with 
their brand-new rifles wrapped in yellow 
muslin and their faces shining with the 
spirit of patriotism and almost fanatic 
eagerness for sacrifice, they moved into the 
trenches toward the Japanese right. 

It was at just this time that the Russian 



NOGI 35 

fleet took refuge in the last corner of the 
harbor where there was escape from the 
shells that with the monotony of an aveng- 
ing fate had been tracking them from spot 
to spot within the port. At a council of 
war held at Nogi's headquarters the con- 
sensus of opinion was that there should 
be another general assault. For several 
hours they debated it, these hardened, mud- 
stained generals, who had been living with 
their troops in bomb-proofs and in the 
trenches. Nogi listened long and patiently 
to all. But his mind was thinking ever 
of the Russian fleet, that potent menace, 
while it was afloat, to the greater strategy 
of the whole Japanese campaign. With 
the Vladivostok fleet still effective, and 
with rumors of the Baltic fleet coming out 
in the spring, the remnant of the Port 
Arthur fleet was a vital consideration to 
the Japanese, as much so perhaps as the 
town itself. When the rest had finished 
talking, Nogi is said to have remarked 



36 NOGI 

quietly, " Gentlemen, there is but one 
point from which we can look into the 
refuge of the Russian fleet. That point is 
from the summit of 203 Metre Hill. From 
there we can see the fleet, with our tele- 
scopes, and in two days destroy it. The 
position is a hard one to carry. It will 
cost us dearly. But as a point of observa- 
tion it is worth a division. We have our 
new Seventh, and we will throw that 
against this hill." And then in his quiet, 
impersonal way he outlined the general 
plan for the assault and named the day 
for the undertaking, and without a word 
his officers went to their respective posi- 
tions to carry out the details of the 
preparations which had been intrusted to 
them. 

This was the decision of Nogi. 

Who is there that can tell what it cost 
him personally to override the advice of 
his officers? 

Who can describe the anguish at his 



NOGI 37 

heart as in placid impersonal tones he gave 
those orders? 

Why? 

Because there in the front trenches oc- 
cupied by the Seventh Division, serving 
as a subaltern of infantry, was his only 
surviving son. His lot would be to move 
among the first, when the order of ad- 
vance should be whispered softly along the 
line. Many and many such assaults be- 
fore this had Nogi ordered, and on many 
and many a morning after had he read the 
list of names that represented the price of 
parapets scaled and forts subdued. Well did 
he realize what it meant to scale this all but 
perpendicular hill of 680 feet, the summit 
of which was swept by three great Rus- 
sian forts. 

A harder nut to crack did not exist on 
the Russian line. 

Yet he gave the orders as quietly as he 
would arrange with his orderly for his 
horse on the morrow. And what was the 



38 NOGI 

result of it all? What could it be? Almost 
before the Japanese had commenced the 
desperate fighting for that tragic knoll, 
young Nogi, the last of the race of which 
the old General himself had sprung, lay 
(dead within a few short yards of the trench 
from which the assault was launched. It 
is not necessary to go into the details of 
the fight. Many days it lasted; probably 
no bitterer, wickeder contest ever raged 
between men. Again and again the as- 
saulting columns advanced, and again and 
again they were dislodged. Acres of dead 
each day remained to tell the tale of the 
Japanese intent to scale the heights and 
get their " line of vision " to the doomed 
fleet, for doomed it was. Day after day 
J the halo of bursting shells marked out the 
hill where raged the battle. At last even 
the stubborn Russians retired, and the day 
was won. The cost? No one knows save 
the Japanese. Some say 10,000, some say 
20,000. Nogi had said it was worth a 



NOGI 39 

division, and there is little doubt but that 
it cost all of that dreadful toll. What it 
cost Nogi himself was a broken heart, 
though I could not learn from his aides 
that he ever alluded to his son's death 
after he first received the news. 

A week later the fleet was lying at the 
bottom of the harbor, and the doom of 
Port Arthur was sealed, though it held on 
still. December dragged out to its ap- 
pointed end, and on January 1st Stoessel 
surrendered. 

And when Port Arthur lay prostrate 
at his feet with thousands of prisoners and 
tons of spoils, Nogi was the man in all 
the world that held fixed the public eye. 
Every civilized nation paid him the hom- 
age of its admiration. Papers printed his 
picture and " stories " on his Hfe. The 
German Emperor sent him a cable of 
congratulation and honored him with a 
decoration. His own sovereign gave him 
the greatest recognition that had been ac- 



40 NOGI 

corded to any man in the war up to that 
time. Japan blazed with his name. He 
was a national hero, a demigod. Bales of 
telegrams were showered upon him in his 
little headquarters in the house of mud. 
And how did he receive all this? Was he 
pleased with this exalted fulfilment of a 
soldier's ambition? Did he share in the 
turbulent rejoicings of his men? The an- 
swer is best told in the words of one of his 
aides, who said to me: "When Port Ar- 
thur had fallen and while all of us of the 
staff were rejoicing, we missed the General, 
who had withdrawn from us. I found him 
in his house in the dim light of his lamp. 
He was seated alone, with his face in his 
hands. On his cheeks were tears. When 
he saw me he said, " This is no occasion 
for rejoicing. It has cost us both too 
dearly." 



CHAPTER V 

NOTHING could have been more in- 
opportune for the fortunes of the 
Russians than the fall of Port Arthur and 
the release of Nogi and his army of vet- 
erans. From the point of view of nearly 
ten years after it may well be described, 
this achievement of Nogi's, as the definite 
turning point in the war, the moment which 
produced the cause which rendered Mouk- 
den possible for the Japanese. And it 
might have been otherwise had Stoessel 
been of the same mold as the leader who 
day and night for those many months had 
been directing the assault against him. 
The Russian commander, long sick of the 
defense, and never heart and soul in it at 
best, capitulated, giving out the excuse that 
he was at the end of his resources and 
could resist no longer. This plea was 

41 



42 NOGI 

generally accepted, and for a few brief 
months he too basked in the sunshine of 
the world's plaudits as one who had en- 
dured to the uttermost and had succumbed 
only when he was no longer able to con- 
tinue the resistance. But with the fall of 
the supposedly impoverished and exhausted 
Port Arthur came another side to the 
story, a side indeed which resulted later in 
the trying of Stoessel and in the imposi- 
tion on him by a court-martial of the 
sentence of death, subsequently commuted 
to life imprisonment. For on the counting 
of the effectives and the taking of the in- 
ventory by the Japanese of the captured 
supplies both of food and ammunition, it 
seemed that there were still, in spite of 
the scandalous waste, many rounds of 
ammunition and food which with economy 
might have lasted for weeks. I remember 
months later in Northern Manchuria din- 
ing with a certain Japanese general who 
was in a position to know, and pressing 




o 






O 



:j 



NOGI 43 

him for his opinion as to how long the 
fortress might have held out. He hesitated 
for a long time, for it was not considered 
good form among the Japanese to criticise 
the enemy. Finally, after considerable 
pressing, he said, " I cannot say how long 
the Russians might have held out. They 
made a very brave defense, and we admire 
them greatly. But had Port Arthur been 
occupied by the Japanese — ah, then — yes, 
I think it would have been different. Two 
months at least would we have had food 
and ammunition — but I do not of course 
criticise the Russians." Two months! It 
might well have made a great difference in 
the issue of the war! How? Simply 
enough. Nogi moved almost immediately 
from Port Arthur to the North where 
Oyama lay with his four great armies fac- 
ing Kuropatkin's divisions. The great 
Moukden battle was not launched till 
Nogi came, and then for nearly one solid 
month was the issue engaged. It was 



44 NOGI 

Nogi and his Third Army from Port 
Arthur that turned the flank and made 
the retreat of the Russians necessary; it 
was Nogi and his men who made the vic- 
tory possible. Scarcely was the battle 
ended, when the spring was upon Man- 
churia, with the frost coming out of the 
ground and the roads heavy. Had Stoessel 
held out two months or even one month 
longer the great battle would have been 
delayed till June perhaps, or had it been 
fought earlier in the spring muds, the his- 
tory of the flanking movement might have 
been quite different. For it is one thing 
to move troops, artillery, munitions and 
transports over frozen ground and quite 
another to perform the same feat when the 
earth is an ooze of greasy mud. A battle 
fought in June would have seen the Rus- 
sian army stronger by perhaps 100,000 
men or may be even more. What, 
then, might have been the issue? It 
is useless, however, to speculate now, and 



NOGI 45 

besides it is outside the province of this 
sketch. 

No sooner were the formalities of sur- 
render over and the prisoners sent to 
Japan than the men of the Third Army 
were free at last to join their brothers in 
the North. Nogi and his men reached the 
rear of Oyama's united armies about the 
middle of February, and almost at once 
the battle of Moukden began. The con- 
flict which started then was in reality a 
thousand different battles and skirmishes, 
and continued until nearly the middle of 
March, when the last fragment of the 
shattered Russian divisions limped wearily 
through the Tie Pass. 

I was not personally with the Army at 
Moukden, having late in the previous fall 
been invalided back to Japan, and my 
authority for the comments on Moukden 
is Frederick McCormick, perhaps the 
ablest of the correspondents that were in 
the Orient during the war. He repre- 



46 NOGI 

sented the Associated Press. Directly 
after the war I met him in Japan and 
from him learned a little of what the 
Russians thought of Nogi and his men. 
The Russians knew, according to McCor- 
mick, that Nogi was loose somewhere, but 
not for days after the battle did they 
know just where he was to be expected. 
From the time the battle commenced it 
was Nogi who was the terror of the whole 
army from flank to flank. All knew he 
had joined Oyama. None knew where he 
would strike. To the privates of the Si- 
berian steppes and the peasants drafted 
from the valleys of the Volga and the 
far-off Neva, this man Nogi was the in- 
carnation of fury, the demon of war. 
His men were pictured by campfires at 
night as devils of blood and fire who would 
stop at nothing, who eagerly sought death 
in their efforts to reach a hand-to-hand 
encounter with their foes. The stories of 
the attacks at Port Arthur, though difH- 



NOGI 47 

cult to exaggerate, were enlarged upon 
until the whole Russian army pictured 
Nogi and his men as superhuman creatures 
steeped in blood and deep-dyed in hatred, 
soldiers for whom death held no terrors 
and who, once launched on an assault, 
would keep attacking until the last man 
was killed. Again and again the narrative 
of 203 Metre Hill, where the Japanese 
sacrificed 15,000 men for the possession of 
an observation station, was told in Russian 
ranks, where one might also hear the story 
how the Japanese infantry in one assault 
were exhausted and with ammunition spent 
refused to retreat and remained and threw 
stones at their enemies until the last man 
w^as killed. It is safe to say that no war- 
rior and no army were ever more feared 
than were this same Nogi and his men at 
Moukden. From the time the battle 
started, the one great dread in every quar- 
ter of the Russian host was that it would 
be Nogi himself who would be thrown 



48 NOGI 

against them. A dozen false rumors 
heralded in a dozen quarters the fabled ap- 
proach of this super-demon, and a dozen 
times the rumors were dispelled as idle 
gossip; at last the blow fell and then 
like wildfire the truth flashed electrically 
through the entire Russian army that the 
famous Third Army of the Japanese was 
already well around their right, and strik- 
ing at full speed for their line of retreat. 
And when at last the attack came, there 
was no doubt of where and how Nogi was 
striking, for at the first point of contact 
on the Russian flank, the veterans of Port 
Arthur, who esteemed fighting in the open 
as nothing after the grisly heights of the 
beleaguered fortress, appeared suddenly, 
and as it seems unknown to the Russians, 
well toward the rear and outside the flank, 
and in their first assault crumpled up the 
Russian defense like paper. With shouts 
which with characteristic Japanese subtlety 
they had been taught in the Russian Ian- 



NOGI 49 

guage they advanced, screaming between 
their Banzais, " We are Nogi's men from 
Port Arthur! " And from the instant this 
fear-inspiring cry sounded on the Russian 
flank the battle was lost. The spirit of 
hope abandoned spread like fire, and soon 
the whole great army was in retreat. Not 
the retreat of panic, perhaps, but the stub- 
born retirement of men paralyzed with the 
certainty that victory was impossible. 
When the flanking movement reached its 
apex near Tiding, Nogi, in the West, 
could view^ the line of the Russian retreat 
flowing through the neck of the bottle 
which led to the North. While Nogi's ar- 
tillery was playing shrapnel and death 
on the main road, from the West, Kuroki 
was thundering at the same target with 
his guns from the East. A single division, 
or perhaps less, of mounted infantry, with 
either Nogi or Kuroki, could have broken 
the line of retreat, and the war might have 
ended on the spot, with the capture of 



50 NOGI 

the Russian army. But the supreme had 
been achieved when both these devoted 
armies reached the Tiehng Pass. The 
men, had they been fresh, would have 
broken through the hne and cut off the 
retreat. But they had been marching 
short-rationed for days, and they lacked 
the final ounce of vigor to " turn the 
trick," and though with their last strength 
they made a few feeble attempts to do so, 
it proved impossible. After the war one 
of the medical men high in authority told 
me that the soldiers of Nogi's army on the 
last days of the flanking movement had 
moved so much faster than their food sup- 
/ plies that many of them had had no food 
to speak of for several days, and to prove 
his statement he affirmed that hundreds of 
soldiers that were shot through the in- 
testines made rapid recoveries for the rea- 
son that their intestines were so destitute 
of food that in many cases they were flat 
and dry, and the punctures healed quickly 



NOGI 51 

without the danger of poisoning which 
usually follows abdominal wounds. 

At Moukden Nogi, though successful in 
the eyes of the world, felt but meager sat- 
isfaction. Again had his legions been deci- 
mated, and despite his victory, his satis- 
faction was dampened by the realization 
that the sacrifice of his men had not been 
fully compensated by complete success. 



CHAPTER VI 

WHEN the smoke of Moukden 
cleared away and the dead were 
buried, there came upon both armies a 
long period of inaction, which, barring a 
few minor engagements, lasted until the 
coming of peace the following fall. When 
the Russians had pulled themselves to- 
gether after their rout and hideous losses, 
they spread out their cohorts in a long 
line across Manchuria, with their center 
on the railroad a little North of the Tie 
Pass. For a month or so the two armies 
were in a state of readjustment, form- 
ing new general lines of opposition. 
The Japanese, with Moukden as Oyama's 
grand headquarters, threw out their five 
great armies in an extended belt reaching 
from the frontier of old Mongolia on the 
extreme West to the Korean hills on the 
right, a total distance of nearly 180 miles. 

62 




o 



H 



NOGI 53 

Nogi, with the First, Seventh and Ninth 
divisions, all of which came with him from 
Port Arthur, was given the post of honor 
on the left flank of the Japanese. During 
the latter part of March and early April he 
pushed on North and West, driving before 
him the last scattered fringe of the Russian 
resistance. Toward the last of April he 
occupied, as his headquarters, the little 
Chinese town of Fakumen, while he pushed 
his Seventh Division of Port Arthur fame 
thirty miles beyond to the North and | 
West, and his Ninth of the Port Arthur 
center to the East of that, while the First 
took up its position to the rear and between 
the two. All forthwith began to intrench 
and throw up gun positions to render the 
line thus occupied impervious to a Russian 
attempt to regain the ground lost in March. 
By the first of May the general position, 
which was maintained until the end of the 
war, was occupied, and the armies settled 
down to await the passing of the spring, 



54 NOGI 

and the ensuing rainy season with its mud 
and heavy roads. This, at least, was the 
reason given out for the long delay, and 
it seemed an adequate one, but I am per- 
sonally of the opinion that there was an- 
other and an even more potent cause for 
the long halt. There seems little doubt 
but that the Japanese had shot their bolt 
at Moukden. I do not mean by that that 
they could have gone no farther, but many 
reasons led those of us with the Army to 
believe that beyond Moukden their plans 
had not been laid out in the detail with 
which they were accustomed to act. The 
staff had without doubt foreseen and care- 
fully planned the whole strategy of the 
campaign up to Moukden, and here they 
had expected that the war would end, pos- 
sibly with the capture or utter demoraliza- 
tion of Kuropatkin. They had defeated 
him badly to be sure, but a month later 
they were facing the same army in a new 
position, and they were confronting the 



NOGI 55 

problem of another battle even larger than 
was Moukden itself. As far as troops, 
supplies and munitions were concerned the 
Japanese might have gone forward again 
as soon as the roads were passable, but 
there is little doubt that maps and carefully 
calculated programs for a farther advance 
were wanting. Without such minute pre- 
arrangements they never moved. It seems 
certain that while the world was waiting 
all that summer for news from the " front," 
the Japanese themselves were working 
night and day preparing maps, and work- 
ing out details for another battle, with the 
same care and perfection with which they 
had planned the early stages of the war. 
But more of that anon. 

It was at this time that Richard Barry, 
then of Collier's Weekly, and myself re- 
joined the Third Army. Neither of us 
had been present at Moukden, and we had 
not seen Nogi since the withering days at 
Port Arthur. There all had been tense 



56 NOGI 

and the whole staff and army, though out- 
wardly courteous and polite, had been 
careworn, soiled and desperate, and, 
though the mask that their race so subtly 
draws over the Japanese character hid 
from us the outward aspect of men pressed 
to the last extreme of human anxiety and 
mental misery, yet we felt the potent fire 
of despair and thwarted ambitions that 
smoldered beneath each placid face that 
greeted us always quietly, casually and 
politely. But here in the North it was 
quite different. The terrific tension had 
been eased for the time being, and for the 
first time since the war started we came 
to know a little the men of the Army 
themselves. At Port Arthur there had 
been near a score of war correspondents 
gathered from the four corners of the globe. 
Each had been merely an impersonal unit 
to the staff to whom they had been con- 
signed from the War Office in Japan. 
Each had certain credentials and each was 



NOGI 57 

shipped out to the " front " and treated 
with the scrupulous attention which the 
rules and regulations issued by the War 
Office had laid down for the handling of 
war correspondents. Richard Barry and 
Frederick Villiers, the war artist of the 
Illustrated London News, veteran of a 
score of campaigns, were always, even in 
that strenuous day, favorites of Nogi. The 
rest I think had no place in his thoughts 
at all. But in the North it was far differ- 
ent. In the whole vast Japanese army 
there were, out of almost a hundred cor- 
respondents that had been in Tokio in the 
early stages of hostilities, not above a 
dozen left. The score that had been with 
Nogi had been reduced to three, one man 
besides Barry and myself, and he the cor- 
respondent of the London Times, who had 
only just joined the Third Army. Perhaps 
Nogi associated Barry and me with the 
dreadful days in the South, but, in any 
event, from the time we landed in Faku- 



58 NOGI 

men after a forty-mile ride from the near- 
est station at Tieling, he treated us with 
the intimacy of old friends, and during 
the months that followed I believe we came 
to know the real man as well perhaps as 
any outsiders did during the war. 

Fakumen was a native Manchurian town 
of perhaps 50,000 population, packed with- 
in four walls, a very maze of streets, 
narrow alleys and by-paths wandering 
about in hopeless, planless confusion. 
Away to the West was the dim and dis- 
tant line of the Khin Ghan foothills, be- 
yond which lay the great Gobi Desert. 
To our East was a range of hills through 
a pass in which, a mere defile, lay the road 
to Tieling and Moukden, over which we 
had come. Between the Pass and the dis- 
tant faintly outlined mountains was a rich 
and fertile valley, and in the center of this 
lay Fakumen, quaint, primitive and oddly 
picturesque in its Oriental setting. Indeed 
the only touches to link it with the Twen- 




X 



fee 






NOGI 59 

tieth Century were the incongruous mani- 
festations of a modern army, signs which 
greeted us unexpectedly at every turn. 
Here near an old Chinese temple that had 
stood aloof for centuries shrouded in the 
halo of the mystic Oriental atmosphere, 
one would stumble on a Japanese battery 
in repose. The guns, with their long sleek 
lines and cruel aspect, leered cynically at 
us from the very shadows of the portals 
within which surly priests were burning 
incense and mumbling their quaint services. 
The walls of every town and village 
were loop-holed for rifle and artillery fire, 
and we could scarcely wander a foot from 
our doorway without stumbling over Japa- 
nese soldiers and lines of transport. Enter 
almost any compound in the town and 
one would confront neatly stacked pyra- 
mids of the modern rifles of the Japanese. 
The Northern wall of the town was the 
line of old Mongolia, and in its center was 
a huge stone gate, built centuries before. 



60 NOGI 

Again and again have I stood in the 
shadow of its great overhanging lintel and 
watched the ebb and flow of civilizations 
separated in all but time itself by a thou- 
sand years. One moment would see the 
passing of a string of Chinese coolies, long 
poles on shoulders from which swayed 
baskets of vegetables and produce. The 
next instant a trim figure on horseback 
would clear a path through the stolid, im- 
passive Chinamen, and a long line of pon- 
toon boats on trucks for the bridge trains 
up ahead would rattle and rumble through 
the gate. Then would come a Chinese 
cart with its primitive wooden wheels, all 
just as it might have been in the days 
of Confucius, to be followed perhaps by 
the Japanese telegraph corps, with their 
coils of copper wire on reels and wagons 
loaded with bamboo poles and glass in- 
sulators. One could never step into the 
street without being struck with these 
strange contrasts. 



NOGI 61 

And here in this town, on one of the 
little side streets among the winding alleys, 
in a compound built of stone and mud, 
lived Nogi himself, as simply, quietly and 
without ostentation as one of his own or- 
derlies might have done. A sentry at the 
gate, a few officers loitering about the 
courtyard and a handful of orderlies and 
servants that move quietly about their 
tasks, are all that distinguish the General's 
headquarters from a dozen other similar 
dwellings in the town. We see the General 
occasionally in the streets, when he always 
salutes us in a kindly fashion with a little 
friendly smile; but in his headquarters 
itself, and in his little workroom with its 
rough Chinese bed in one corner, we are 
received as cordially as we are in the quar- 
ters of the mihtary attaches or of our 
brother correspondent of the London 
Times, We are made at home, given tea, 
cakes and Japanese sweetmeats with the 
simplicity that is characteristic of Japa- 



62 NOGI 

nese hospitality. Nogi has changed greatly 
since we last saw him. His hair is now 
streaked with gray, while tragedy and 
pathos are written deep in the lines of his 
face. Only when he smiles and when the 
little twinkle shines in his deep black eyes 
does his face light up. But the moment 
that repose returns to his features, the 
shadow of Port Arthur, sons gone forever, 
friends killed in scores, seems to cast its 
" melancholy mantle o'er his brow." The 
General here is much more punctilious in 
his dress. He is never brilliant in his at- 
tire, but now he is always clad with abso- 
lute perfection as to detail. His long 
military boots are of patent leather and 
invariably resplendent in their polish. The 
simple insignia of his rank are ever freshly 
burnished, and his long brown military 
overcoat, with its three gold stars and three 
stripes on the sleeve, always looks the 
same. 




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CHAPTER VII 

ONE afternoon in May, 1905, Barry 
and I dropped in on the General 
for a cup of tea and what the members of 
his staff, in the occasional little formal 
notes in which we were asked to call, were 
pleased to refer to as " chit-chats." This 
particular day the General was curled up 
in a great arm-chair, his feet, shorn of 
the great high military boots, and tucked 
away under him, and he received us pleas- 
antly and intimately without even the for- 
mality of getting up. For nearly three- 
quarters of an hour we sipped tea, smoked 
cigarettes and exchanged pleasantries about 
the life in Fakumen and the common- 
places of our daily doings, while we waited 
for the advance. Never had the General 
seemed more casual, and as it seemed to 
us so free from the responsibilities of the 

63 



64 NOGI 

great army of which he was the absolute 
dictator. Finally his face grew thought- 
ful, and he suddenly volunteered, with a 
deprecating little smile and a gesture half 
of regret and half of apology, " You must 
excuse me now, for I am somewhat busy 
this afternoon, for the Russians under 
Mischenko are making a raid to cut off 
our communications." How absolutely 
typical of the Japanese! To chat idly and 
without concern for nearly an hour about 
mere pleasantries, and then, almost as an 
afterthought, to tell us the only bit of 
news that six weeks had brought forth dur- 
ing the quiet of the Army's doings. We 
withdrew promptly, needless to say, with- 
out being able to elicit any further details 
as to what was going on. Nogi would 
answer all our questions with little smiles 
and bows and polite evasions, just as 
though it were all a slight joke between us. 
Looking back on it now, I think that 
this very day must have brought to Nogi 



NOGI 65 

one of the acutest annoyances of all that 
summer in Manchuria; for, as we soon 
learned, our whole town, including the 
Third Army base, Nogi, and the entire 
staff, came within an ace of being gobbled 
up by the Russians, who failed only 
through their own dense stupidity or want 
of enterprise. As mentioned before, we 
were on the extreme Japanese left and 
forty miles away from us was General 
Mischenko and a division of Cossack 
cavalry, which formed the extreme Russian 
right. With some eight or ten thousand 
of his cavalry and a battery or two of 
light artillery, this enterprising com- 
mander had completely circled the Japa- 
nese left end, and the first intimation the 
headquarters received of the raid at all 
was when a flying column of the Russians 
dropped in on the main road between 
Nogi and his advance divisions and wiped 
out a field hospital and knocked about some 
of our transports. Almost simultaneously 



66 NOGI 

some two thousand Russians appeared on 
the hills within a few miles of Fakumen. 
Nogi, though he had probably 100,000 
men under his command, was so far in 
the rear of the line of the Army that he 
had, all told, in his headquarters village 
hardly a full company of infantry. But 
the Russians, with characteristic ignorance 
or for lack of initiative, never even made 
an attempt to enter the town, though they 
must have outnumbered our little garrison 
by at least ten to one. Their sources of in- 
formation were nearly always defective, 
and it is very probable that they did not 
realize that the captor of Port Arthur was 
within their grasp. At no place any- 
where near us was there any large body 
of troops, as our forces were widely scat- 
tered in villages for miles in every direc- 
tion. The batteries of artillery were in a 
similar way widely spread about, there 
being never more than one or two batteries 
in one place. These were all connected 



NOGI 67 

with headquarters by telephone. The 
horses were backed into small shelters made 
of matting, with faces out, much as fire- 
department horses are kept in American 
cities. Their harness was hanging on 
nearby hooks, and it was the work of but 
a few minutes to hitch up when orders 
came and to pull out with an entire bat- 
tery. And this very afternoon, after we 
had left Nogi with the news of the Mis- 
chenko raid humming in our heads, we had 
an opportunity to witness a sample of 
Japanese mobilization. It was as though 
some one in a city had stepped to the 
nearest corner and sent in a fire alarm 
from one of our red fire-boxes. The 
alarm had been sent out from Nogi's head- 
quarters as soon as the unexpected enemy 
had shown up, that is to say, a little past 
noon. The first response came while we 
were discussing the possibilities of the sit- 
uation after we had left Nogi. And it 
was one to cheer the heart of even the 



68 NOGI 

most blase or the dullest among us. The 
first battery to reach us had come, per- 
haps, six miles, and it came pounding in 
through the great Mongolian Gate, with 
the horses at a gallop, their necks thrust 
to their uttermost through their collars, 
as, six to a team, they fairly flew over the 
road with the guns bounding and jump- 
ing along behind, the men clinging for 
dear life to their seats, and the whole, 
from lead horse to gun-muzzle, coated in 
mud and dirt. As they entered Fakumen 
they slowed down to a trot, and with rattle 
of chains and clink of saber, came to a 
halt in the center of the town. The horses 
were lathered with sweat, and their blood- 
red nostrils were dilated, as with heads 
hung low they gasped for breath after 
their long dash. Ten minutes later a 
second battery jangled in from the East, 
fully as exhausted as the first. Perhaps 
thirty minutes after this a squadron of 
cavalry, blown and sweating, came racing 



NOGI 69 

in over the main Kharbin road from the 
North, and by nightfall the streets were 
filled with bivouacked soldiers of the three 
branches of the service. 

Fakumen, that at noon might have 
fallen an easy prey to a single squadron 
of Cossack cavalry, would not have been 
menaced by a division at six that night. 

And while all this had been brewing, 
we had been sitting quietly with Nogi 
drinking tea! 



CHAPTER VIII 

T T UMILITY in victory is as much of 
-■--■- a test of the fineness of a man's char- 
acter as is the ability to bear defeat and 
personal losses in the hour of disappoint- 
ment at an ambitious plan of victory gone 
astray. Nogi had won our everlasting 
admiration at Port Arthur by his accept- 
ance of all the misery and grief that was 
his portion there. In the North we had an 
opportunity to see him in another role. 
It was the day after Togo and his re- 
doubtable fleet had so overwhelmingly 
crushed the Russian Baltic fleet in the bat- 
tle of the Sea of Japan. For two days we 
had received hints from the staff of what 
was going on, and we were not surprised 
on the second day when an aide called at 
our quarters and in his halting English in- 
formed us of the details of the sweeping 

70 



NOGI 71 

naval victory and stated that it was Gen- 
eral Nogi's wish that we should come to 
his headquarters at seven that evening and 
drink toasts in honor of the Japanese Nel- 
son, who, by his last achievement, had 
utterly destroyed all hopes of a Russian 
naval supremacy. So it was that we gath- 
ered, Barry, the London Times man, and 
myself, in the long Chinese room where 
Nogi and his staff met for their councils. 
When we arrived, some fifty or more offi- 
cers of the staff and commanders of nearby 
brigades and regiments were already as- 
sembled. Down the center was a long 
table spread with a great white cloth. 
There were no chairs, but every two feet 
on the board was placed one of the tin 
drinking cups that the Japanese used in 
the field. The room hummed with the talk 
and laughter of the officers, all exuberant 
at the great news from the sea. Suddenly 
a hush fell on the gathering, and without 
we heard that familiar sound of saber 



72 NOGI 

dragging and spur-chains ringing on stone 
flagging. The door opened and in came 
the Chief, his great boots, with their tops 
flapping about his knees and his military 
coat thrown open, disclosing the simple 
uniform of the Japanese general. A few 
paces behind him followed his personal 
staff. As the General passed, every officer 
stood at attention, and every eye followed 
him with respectful and reverential gaze 
as he walked slowly to the end of the long 
room and took his place at the head of the 
table. It is not a picture that any of us 
who were there will soon forget. That long 
white room with the quiet masterful figure, 
cup in hand, standing silently and detached 
at the head of the board. At his right is 
old Ichinohe, his chief-of-staff, formerly 
commander of the Sixth Brigade, who not 
so many months ago led in person the final 
successful assault on the famous P redoubt 
of the East Keekwan fort at Port Arthur, 
one of the most impossible positions on the 



NOGI 73 

whole line. Near by, in a somewhat shabby 
uniform, is the Colonel of Engineers, whose 
scores of inventions and devices were such 
an important factor in the operations 
against the great stronghold in the South. 
On every hand crowd, eager-faced, the 
generals and officers who have shared the 
Commander's confidence and who fought 
with him, from ditch to ditch, during those 
long months of heartburn and nerve-fray- 
ing misery on the tip of the Liaotung 
Peninsula. Here, also, stands the good 
old General of the Commissariat, whose 
ceaseless labors have made comfort possible 
to the soldiers, even on the firing line. 
A bit farther down the table is the quiet 
impassive face of the Inspector General of 
the medical staff, to whose untiring energy 
and skill thousands of recovering wounded 
in Japan owe their lives to this day. Next 
him is the Commander of the Artillery, 
recently made a lieutenant general for his 
Port Arthur record. Next, with the yellow 



74 NOGI 

facings on his uniform, is the General com- 
manding the cavalry of the western army, 
who has ridden in forty miles from the 
extreme front in order to be present to- 
day. His uniform is crumpled and dusty 
with the long hours in the saddle, but his 
face is beaming. Below him in still a dif- 
ferent uniform is the engineer officer who 
is to-day in charge of the line of defensive 
trenches which are being constructed in 
the far front of our army. Everj^ branch 
of the service in Manchuria is represented. 
Khaki-clad officers of infantry, with gold 
aigrettes showing their staff rank, the 
officers of the artillery with facings of red, 
soldiers of the commissariat, Red Cross, 
transport line, telegraph and bridge trains, 
all, in fact, that go to make for the suc- 
cess and victory of an army, are gathered 
here to do honor to their own Chief and 
through him to Togo, the Emperor and 
Japan itself. On the left of the General 
the correspondents are given room. Near 




3 



o 
'A 



NOGI 75 

us stands Yamaguchi, the linguist of the 
Third Army, who speaks a dozen lan- 
guages with a fluency that is depressing to 
those who barely master one. At last all 
are assembled. The room is crowded to 
the doors with men in uniform. A little 
hum of conversation has been resumed, as 
Nogi speaks in an undertone to us of the 
Press. But suddenly a silence falls as the 
Commander raises his cup filled with 
champagne. Still holding it aloft he 
speaks rapidly in Japanese, and as he fin- 
ishes he gives it a little jerk upward as he 
cries the single word that we have under- 
stood, "Banzai!" Then, with a roar like 
a salvo of field artillery, comes the an- 
swering " Banzai! " from every man within 
the walls. Again and again the cry rings 
out, that deep-chested war note that must 
ever thrill the blood of one who has heard 
it at the front, drifting across the field of 
battle to the deep chorus of the roar of 
guns. The rafters ring again and again. 



76 NOGI 

The air fairly shakes with the tumult close 
confined. Nogi looks on with a little 
quizzical smile on his face. At last his 
smile fades away and a look half stern, 
half sad takes its place. He raises his right 
hand. Instantly silence falls on the room. 
Every man leans forward to catch his 
General's words. What he said was trans- 
lated to us and was something as follows; 
"It is right that we should drink to our 
fleet and to our brave sailors and Togo 
our Admiral. Through the celestial vir- 
tues of his Imperial Majesty they have 
won a great victory. But we must always 
remember that our enemy have had great 
misfortune for their portion, and as we drink 
to our victory, let us not forget our enemy in 
the hour of his distress. We must recognize 
in them worthy foes who have met death 
in a cause into which they have been un- 
justly forced. Let us then drink with 
reverence to our own heroes and with 
sympathetic respect to our fallen foes." 



NOGI 77 

This is the typical Nogi. Then he turns to 
us, all lightness and laughter again, and 
calling on each of us for a speech, he 
stands smilingly by as our remarks are 
translated to him. Eraser of the Times 
fills the General's cup again as he pro- 
poses a toast from England. Nogi is de- 
lighted, and when the Englishman has 
finished, he laughingly goes down the table 
hunting for a bottle that is not yet drained 
and comes back to us, laughing like a 
child, with one, half-empty, which, with an 
air of the greatest gravity, he distributes 
equally among us. At last he shakes our 
hands and goes out into the compound. 
After a few minutes of talk with the offi- 
cers, we too bid them good-night, and walk 
out into gathering night. It is after eight 
and the twilight is just fading into dark- 
ness as we emerge. 

As we walk out of the inclosure I notice 
a man in high boots and a long brown 
overcoat standing beneath the shadow of a 



78 NOGI 

shed, leaning on a roughly-hewn manger 
as he strokes the neck and nose of a big 
bay horse. He pulls the beautiful head 
of the charger down on his breast, and 
with his free hand presses beneath the ex- 
pectant pink mouth a Japanese sweetmeat. 
The man turns from out the shadow, and 
the last light falls upon his serene face. 
It is Nogi: the man who spent 100,000 
lives at Port Arthur. 



CHAPTER IX 

NOGI, like all other great men, had 
a weak "spot." His "heel of 
Achilles," I suppose, it might be called. 
In our innumerable conversations with him 
as the summer drew on, I could never 
learn, by so much as a word, that he took 
any great pride in either Port Arthur or 
the Moukden campaign. Of self-adulation 
or even consciousness that he had done 
great things there never was the slightest 
indication. He was a soldier born, bred 
and trained. A long line of Samurai an- 
cestors had for centuries past been warring 
and leading men to bloodshed, and victory 
or defeat, as the case might be. To Nogi 
I dare say it seemed the normal thing for 
men to do their duty and live up to those 
curious half-defined ideals which the an- 
cient Japanese so cherished. Had he failed, 

79 



80 NOGI 

I suppose he would have perished of 
chagrin. That he had succeeded he ac- 
cepted as a matter of course. It was his 
profession to fight and to win, and that 
he had so practised it was but part of the 
day's work. The personal standpoint I 
think held little or no interest for him. 
As for the adulation and almost hero-wor- 
ship that Japan lavished on him, it seemed 
to make no impression and was accepted in- 
differently and no doubt with just a shade 
of annoyance as something superfluous. 
He was merely in his own eyes a tool for 
the accomplishment of certain ends, and 
he cared no more to be idolized by others 
than he did to magnify himself — which was 
not at all. We could talk with him of 
his campaigns, compare him with Caesar, 
Napoleon, Grant or any of the other great 
names of history without eliciting from him 
anything but a little annoyance and a 
" You Americans are great flatterers," and 
then he would quickly change the subject. 



NOGI 81 

But Barry, for whom, as I have men- 
tioned, Nogi cherished a greater regard 
than for the rest of us, discovered the one 
place where the old General was open to 
the seductive use of flattery. It was his 
poetry ! For Nogi once in a while indulged 
in the gentle art of verse. Personally I 
never was a connoisseur of Japanese 
poetry. Barry went in a bit for that sort 
of thing and when, late in the summer, 
he discovered that Nogi composed stanzas 
during his leisure hours, he at once ap- 
proached Yamaguchi, the interpreter, for 
translations. In due time the Japanese 
symbols, over which Nogi had labored, 
were turned into English of a sort and 
placed in Barry's hands. He was enor- 
mously impressed with the ideas and the 
gentle shades of expression in which the 
old General had indulged, and for a week 
was in an ecstasy of enthusiasm over their 
translation into English in suitable meters. 
Again and again he called on Nogi to dis- 



82 NOGI 

cuss this agreeable theme. I used to go 
along too, but was as non grata to both, 
I think, as a chaperon at a lovers' meet- 
ing. Nogi would sit in his chair, his feet 
tucked away under him, while Barry 
would discuss the merits of his verse. 
Here, indeed, every shot told, and he 
whom we had found invulnerable to every 
other appeal to his vanity, was as eager 
as a child to hear his poetry extolled. I 
well remember how he sat with rapt ex- 
pression and eyes half closed as Barry, 
who had made a translation (and a good 
one too), explained to him the difficulty 
he had had in getting the proper meter 
in which to carry the ideas. It was a 
vexed problem, as Barry said, whether the 
meters of Shakespeare or those of Swin- 
burne were the more worthy to carry the 
ideas of the General. Barry was sincere 
in the matter, for he never ceased praising 
this side of Nogi's character, and all the 
while he was discussing the warrior's 



NOGI 83 

poetry, the General was as pleased as 
Punch. I do not know how many inter- 
views they had about it, but certainly a 
great many. 

Our own little house was across the 
street from the larger compound where 
Nogi lived, and so, as the summer ad- 
vanced, we used more and more frequently 
to run over in the evenings for the little 
" chit-chats " with the General. The nat- 
ural result was that we gradually began 
to know more and more of the man as 
opposed to the mere soldier of Port Ar- 
thur. He took more interest in our wel- 
fare than ever before, and his first ques- 
tion after the greetings were over related 
to how we were faring. Did we have 
fresh meat? No? Then he would in- 
struct the commissariat to send us some 
in the morning. Was our coffee holding 
out? If not, he had some very fine, just 
received from Japan, and as likely as not 
we would have an orderly bringing us a 



84 NOGI 

can or two of it within an hour after we 
returned home. Then, too, he began to 
inquire more closely about our individual 
selves. How old were our parents? Were 
they both living, and where? How did they 
like to have us so far away? and a thou- 
sand other personal and intimate ques- 
tions, which revealed the simple interest 
of a parent, himself bereft of sons. Occa- 
sionally we would draw the conversation 
around to the great problem that lay 
about us in Manchuria and tactfully press 
him for hints as to when we were to move 
forward again. But always with greater 
tact he led us away from the topic which 
he rarely discussed. Once or twice he 
did drop a few words which gave us a 
hint as to what his opinions were as to 
the Russians and some of their leaders. 
" The General says," the interpreter would 
repeat to us, " that he is very sorry for 
the Russians. They are good people, these 
soldiers, and have a hard time. He re- 




o 






s 



Q 
to 









NOGI 85 

grets it very much." And once, when we 
were discussing the removal of Kuropatkin 
and the succession of General Linevitch to 
the supreme command, Nogi said, " The 
Japanese are very thankful to the Czar 
of Russia for his kindness to our army in 
taking General Kuropatkin back to 
Europe. He is a very fine soldier, and 
we are very happy to see him go away 
from the war. No one could have done 
better in his place," and then he hurriedly 
led us off to another subject less vital to 
the war itself. 

\ During June of that summer we had 
some little fighting on our West front and 
once or twice we could hear the distant 
thunder of field guns in action. I remem- 
ber going with Barry to see Nogi, to beg 
him to let us go to the " front " and see 
what was doing. We explained to him 
how dull it was for us and how very little 
news there was to cable home. He lis- 
tened with the greatest attention and ap- 



86 NOGI 

parent interest to our troubles and then 
replied, " What has been going forward 
in our front is of very little importance 
and would not make very much news for 
you, my friends, and might cause me great 
embarrassment." Then he looked at us 
quietly for a while before he continued 
through the interpreter. " You see you 
are out here as guests of Japan and as 
guests of our War Office and so of myself. 
If I were to allow you to go up to our 
advance lines there would be a very large 
chance of your being killed or wounded 
by the Russians. This would be very dis- 
tressing to me because I should be severely 
censured by the War Department for per- 
mitting the Russians thus to kill our 
guests." He paused for a few moments, 
and then went on again, " You see there 
is nothing of much importance going on 
just now in Manchuria and every little 
event is much magnified. If you were 
killed now, it would make big items in 



NOGI 87 

your papers and every one would blame 
General Nogi. I beg of you to wait until 
we have a big battle, and then you will 
see how many privileges of going to and 
fro I will give you. During the big 
battle there will be much news, and if you 
are killed it will not matter; in the con- 
fusion of the battle it will not be noticed." 
We saw his point of view and did not 
again press the question. 
., With us that summer Nogi always 
seemed cheerful and rather optimistic, but, 
as his aides told us, when he was alone he 
was very unhappy and mourned the loss 
of his sons bitterly. When the hot weather 
came, toward the last of June, the old 
General had his orderlies build a kind of 
ladder to the roof of his one-storied house, 
and up to this roof they hoisted with 
ropes an aged arm-chair with rockers. 
And here, night after night, just at twi- 
light, the General used to climb and seat 
himself. From our front stoop in the com- 



88 NOGI 

pound opposite we could see him, though 
we were ourselves invisible, being in the 
shadow. Night after night Barry and I 
used to sit on the stone steps in front of 
the bean-mill in which we lived, and 
watch the silent figure of Nogi sitting in 
the moonlight on his roof. He would take 
off his big boots, and with the inevitable 
sword in his lap he would rock softly to 
and fro as he gazed away and away to 
the distant line of the Khin Ghan foot- 
hills. We two would sit quietly smoking 
our pipes and conversing in whispers un- 
til the silent old figure would slowly get 
out of his chair and, step by step, climb 
down the ladder and disappear from our 
view. Even then we realized that, in spite 
of all his show of gaiety and humor, he 
was a sad and broken-hearted man. 



CHAPTER X 

INASMUCH as Barry and I had 
received so many courtesies from 
Nogi and the staff, we determined to 
reciprocate as best we could, and so, after 
due care and consideration, we drafted a 
formal invitation to the General and cer- 
tain members of his staff, requesting the 
honor of their presence at a dinner to be 
given by us and by Major Joseph E. 
Kuhn, the military attache of the United 
States Army, and naming the date as the 
evening of July Fourth. The very next 
day an aide waited on us and, after many 
salutes and clickings of heels, presented the 
following note, which I have before me 
as I write. It is yellow and badly worn 
from being crammed into the pocket of 
my campaign overcoat but it is still per- 
fectly legible. It reads; 

89 



90 NOGI 

Headquarters Third 

Imperial Japanese Army, 
July 2nd, 1905. 
To the Americans attached to 

the Third Army, 
Gentlemen : — 

As July Fourth is your National Holiday, and the 
occasion of great rejoicing in your country, and as 
there now exists a feeling of great friendship and cor- 
diality between America and Japan, I wish to express 
the esteem that my country holds toward yours, and 
that I, as commander of the Third Army, hold to- 
ward you personally as the only representatives here 
of America, in presenting to you a case of cham- 
pagne, which is sent herewith, that you may drink to 
your independence in Japan's name on that auspicious 
occasion. 

Cordially yours. 

General Baron M. Nogi. 

And sure enough, no sooner had we fin- 
ished reading the note, than an orderly, 
at a signal from the aide, stood forward 
with a case of champagne which, as we 
were afterwards informed, was part of 



NOGI 91 

the stock that Kuropatkin had left in his 
cellars at Moukden, when he had climbed 
into his private car during the last days 
of the battle and started for the North. 
Living as we were so far from a base, it 
was quite a little problem to get up a 
dinner, but by sending our Japanese serv- 
ant to Newchang we managed to collect 
quite a variety both of viands and bever- 
ages for the occasion. Nogi took great 
interest in our preparations, and sent 
General Ichinohe, his chief-of-staff, to 
confer with us and offer what assistance 
lay within his power. Ichinohe threw him- 
self into our preparations with the enthu- 
siasm with which he had led his brigade 
on the P redoubt at Port Arthur, with the 
result that we were at once offered the 
services of the Osaka military band with 
its forty-odd pieces to play during our 
dinner, which we gratefully accepted. 
Next came, ever polite, an officer from the 
commissariat and placed at our disposal 



92 NOGI 

cooks, waiters and food supplies from his 
department. What worried Ichinohe most 
was where we could give a dinner, for 
our " bean-mill " was not only somewhat 
primitive but exceedingly limited in space. 
We ourselves slept in a small square room, 
while the " mill-room " was commandeered 
for our kitchen. But the chief-of-staff 
helped us solve this problem by ordering 
in a detachment of soldiers to build an 
inclosure in our compound, which should 
shut out from the gaze of the diners the 
regiment of pigs, chickens, donkeys and 
assorted inhabitants that usually stood 
about our door and looked into our win- 
dows while we ate. The day of our din- 
ner more soldiers were sent some ten miles 
away to cut greens, so that in the center of 
the mud and slime of our compound we had 
a veritable bower arranged. Outside on 
chairs, also borrowed, sat the band in full 
regalia, and in due course came Nogi him- 
self and his staff, also in their best bibs 



NOGI 98 

and tuckers. Major Kuhn acted as toast- 
master and Nogi was down for the first 
response to the toast " Mikado, King and 
President." Lieutenant General Burnet, 
a fine sample of an old officer who had 
spent a lifetime in India and was in Man- 
churia as attache for England, replied to 
" England and Japan," and when his 
speech was over the band played " God 
Save the King." We sat down to table 
at seven o'clock, and it was long after mid- 
night before our distinguished guest rose 
to depart. This occasion, on the whole, 
was one of the pleasantest features of the 
summer. As I watched Nogi that even- 
ing, with his head freshly shaven and his 
beard trimmed to a mere stubble, it seemed 
impossible to realize that we were in the 
midst of a great and bitter war, and that 
the man who sat at the head of the table 
and playfully joked with us and his offi- 
cers was one of the leading actors therein. 
It seemed incredible that that smiling face, 



94 NOGI 

apparently divested of care or responsi- 
bility, was the same that we used to see 
at Port Arthur, hard, desperate and hag- 
gard. Even more impossible did it seem 
that the quiet, gentle voice that engaged 
so easily in jest and badinage with us 
was the same that in crisp cold sentences, 
from which all traces of humanity or 
sentiment had gone, had issued orders 
destined to hurl tens of thousands to their 
doom. In a way the whole evening seemed 
incongruous. Here we were in our bower 
of greens, with the band giving us Sousa, 
the latest ragtime and our various na- 
tional tunes. All cares were cast to the 
winds, and the mere thought of war seemed 
as out of place as jig-time music at a 
funeral. Yet around us in silent cynical 
might two great armies lay poised for a 
life-and-death struggle. More than a mil- 
lion men, trained for the sole purpose of 
human destruction, were lying on their 
arms, ready at a word from Moukden or 



NOGI 95 

St. Petersburg to lock horns in a new con- 
flict, greater and even more destructive 
than any that had gone before. And when 
the call for the advance should come, these 
very men who talked and laughed so 
lightly with us to-night would again be- 
come the cogs in that smooth-running and 
precise engine of war that we had seen 
before in operation. And if the great ad- 
vance with its inevitable battle did come, 
how many of these guests now assembled 
with us could we muster at a dinner two 
months hence? There was poor Yamao- 
aka, our companion and friend at Port 
Arthur, who was caught in a shrapnel- 
burst at Moukden, and fell with a ball 
through his head, a shot that cut both optic 
nerves. To-night as we laugh and joke 
together, he lies in his home in far-off 
Japan, blind for hfe. But such is war, 
and for the most part we confined our 
thoughts to the present, and when the band 
as a last number played " Auld Lang 



96 NOGI 

Syne " and Nogi and his staff had gone, 
we agreed that our evening had been a 
great success. 



CHAPTER XI 

nn HE Japanese at home as well as 
^ abroad are a great people for cele- 
brations. They have a holiday for the 
girls, a holiday for the boys, and in- 
numerable gala days in which important 
historical events are commemorated. In 
fact they make up for their lack of Sun- 
days by taking a day off at frequent in- 
tervals to rejoice over something or other. 
If it is an important date, so much the 
better. If unimportant — no matter, they 
celebrate with just as much enthusiasm. 
And so it was this summer in Manchuria, 
while we waited expectantly to hear what 
would be the outcome of the peace nego- 
tiations in America, which now formed the 
main topic of all our gossip. Already the 
First Army under Kuroki had held a 
great jubilee away off on our right, in 
order suitably to honor the first anniver- 

97 



98 NOGI 

sary of the battle of the Yalu. The Second 
Army, that lay next us, made an occasion 
of May 26th, when the first really costly 
land battle of the war was fought and 
so many of the Japanese perished under 
the fire of Russian volleys and machine 
guns on the bloody slopes of Nanshan. 
And now at last came our turn to hold 
a day of rejoicing and of festivities. Up 
to the same time a year ago nothing of 
surpassing interest or importance had hap- 
pened in Nogi's army. Our men felt, 
however, that they too must hold some 
sort of a holiday, and so, after mature de- 
liberation, they picked the date when a 
year before they captured the first line of 
hills that formed the defense of Port Ar- 
thur. It was June 30, 1904, when the 
grand old Ninth pivision of the Japanese 
Army occupied and made permanent its 
position on the first great hill that lay 
between the Japanese advance and the 
main line of the Russian defenses. And 



NOGI 99 

so it was that a day was set apart that we 
might rejoice fittingly on the first an- 
niversary of that bloody event. But as the 
rainy season was not yet over in Man- 
churia, when the day came around the 
Army's enthusiasm was postponed until 
August 1st. 

The main event was the wrestling, 
which the Japanese seem to enjoy more 
than any other form of field sport. Weeks 
before the festival the best wrestlers from 
each division had been picked and some 
hundreds of these had come into our head- 
quarters to wrestle off the preliminary 
bouts. Thus, by the afternoon of the 
grand day, there were left only the picked 
men of an army of nearly a hundred thou- 
sand soldiers, all of whom were more or 
less well trained in the art. In one of the 
big compounds the place for the entertain- 
ment was prepared. A square, of an acre 
or more, was roofed over with matting. 
In the center a ring, or, more properly 



1 e • 



100 NOGI 

speaking, a " square " of soft earth, about 
twenty by twenty feet, was raised. On 
one side were seats for the officers. There 
were seated members of the staff and the 
invited guests, while on every other side 
crowded the soldiers, who had been per- 
mitted to come in for the sports. Several 
thousand squatted about in their worn 
khaki suits, to watch the games they so 
admired. At 2:30 in the afternoon all 
were seated save the Commander himself. 
On the front bench were the generals, in- 
cluding Lieutenant General Burnet of the 
British Army and Major General Pertev 
Pasha of the Turkish general staff. At the 
appointed time there was a rustle at the 
outskirts of the crowd and with a single 
movement the entire audience rose, every 
hand at the salute, as the General himself 
came down the narrow lane that was 
cleared for him and took his seat between 
the British and Turkish attaches. Then 
began the wrestling. To a Westerner it 



NOGI 101 

was not as exciting as a prize-fight, or 
even a wrestling-match, as we see them. 
All that is required among these wrestlers 
is that the opponent be thrown or pushed 
out of the ring. The result is that the 
bouts seldom last over a minute and often 
but a few seconds. The two contestants, 
stripped but for a loin cloth, enter the 
square, salute the " grandstand " and then 
face each other. When the umpire gives 
the word, with the agility of cats they 
close upon each other. For a moment 
there is a dead-lock, as the lithe bodies 
sway to and fro, and then one or the 
other is thrown. Occasionally two evenly 
matched men wrestle for over a minute 
before the fall comes. Sometimes one of 
the antagonists will, at the first rush, pick 
up his man, and carry him bodily outside 
of the square and drop him without the 
ropes. For an hour or more on this day 
we watched the wrestling. Then there was 
a variation of the program. It was a dance 



102 NOGI 

— a remarkable dance. A dozen soldiers 
entered the ring dressed only in aprons, 
improvised from what they could pick up 
around the camp. One with a blanket, 
decorated with paper flowers, another with 
a bit of carpet studded with little hand 
mirrors. These dancers joined hands and 
then commenced a series of evolutions, 
which were graceful but not exciting. The 
final matches were over before six o'clock, 
and the victorious athletes were awarded 
their prizes amid the cheers of the audience. 
All through the performance the General 
watched his soldiers with the keenness and 
tenderness that one notes in the eyes of a 
father as he watches his sons on the foot- 
ball field or the baseball diamond. Nogi's 
old eyes would light up with glee at a 
clever bit of work, and he would laugh like 
a child when one of the wrestlers would 
suddenly turn defeat into victory. Once, 
after a hard-fought bout and three drawn 
" falls," when both men had fallen to- 



NOGI 103 

gether, he stopped the games, and directed 
the umpire, so even were the matches, to 
give prizes to both contestants. 

(At six o'clock dinner was served to all 
the officers that had come from the differ- 
ent divisions of the Army. On an elevation 
just outside the wall of the old Chinese 
town, a large quadrangle had been leveled 
off and covered over with matting. Three 
great tables down the center and a single 
table across the top were set out with cold 
viands and Japanese delicacies. The whole 
was trimmed with myriads of little Japa- 
nese paper blossoms made by the soldiers 
in their leisure hours. Outside, behind a 
screen, the Third Army band played. At 
the upper table General Nogi in the center 
entertained the generals who had come in 
from their commands, the foreign attaches, 
and the military correspondents of the 
Army. What a scene it was! The sun 
was just setting in the West, and its last 
crimson rays fell aslant the hills, all about 



104 NOGI 

us, while the more distant mountains stood 
out sharply against the sky. At our feet 
was a little valley, through which burst an 
uproarious stream, swollen far beyond its 
usual meager size by the incessant down- 
pour of the past week. Hundreds of Chi- 
nese in their blue blouses stood beyond the 
sacred inclosure and eyed with open- 
mouthed wonder this scene of hilarity. 
Five hundred officers, all in their finest 
uniforms, crowded about the tables and 
drank one another's healths, consumed 
mountains of cold meat, and rapidly dis- 
posed of gallons of Japanese beer and saki. 
There were Russian bonbons too that were 
wrapped in bits of paper, with the factory- 
mark of far-off Odessa printed thereon. 
All through the Army it was the same that 
summer. Both at work and at play the 
Russians provided for their enterprising 
little enemies. At Dalny we had seen an 
entire Russian town, with Russian houses 
and Russian piers, all at the disposal of the 



NOGI 105 

invaders from the Island Empire, while 
the Japanese at Port Arthur were living 
almost exclusively on supplies taken from 
the enemy. At the front the same was 
true. From these candies to the great 
Russian transport carts, with the Russian 
characters scrawled on their sides, and the 
great siege guns, we saw everywhere the 
uses which the Japanese were making of 
what the Muscovites had abandoned in 
their retreat. After Nogi had drunk the 
health of his foreign guests, he passed 
down the long line of tables, everywhere 
stopping to speak to his officers with a 
pleasant word and a smile for each. As 
we watched the old man among his chil- 
dren, our minds reverted to another scene, 
where but a short twelve months ago were 
present many of these same men. No bright 
uniforms then, nor scene of celebration 
and merriment, with a smiling General and 
passing around of Russian sweetmeats and 
Japanese saki. Then the great hills of 



106 NOGI 

Port Arthur loomed for the first time, for- 
bidding and gloomy, on the vision of these 
very men. The General whom we see 
now wreathed in smiles and radiating good 
humor, then first confronted the great task 
to which he had been assigned. It is with 
a suppressed sigh that we think of the 
many officers and friends that but a year 
ago were our hosts and cordial entertainers, 
but who lie to-day in Manchurian graves, 
pierced by Russian bullets or torn by 
shrapnel. 

And thus did we of the Third Army 
celebrate our great occasion. The early 
morning of the next day saw the roads, in 
all directions, crowded with the officers rid- 
ing back to their divisions and outposts. 
The holiday was over, and again our minds 
reverted to the problem that was ever with 
us. Were we to have more of grim and 
relentless war, or was a treaty to be signed 
at Portsmouth that would bring peace to 
the armies in distant Manchuria? 



CHAPTER XII 

T II TITH the advance of August the in- 
^ ▼ dications that peace would be the 
outcome of the Portsmouth " chit-chats " 
became more and more promising. We at 
the front knew nothing, for during the lat- 
ter part of the negotiations our mails were 
delayed or held up, and the papers from 
Japan came rarely to us and the rest of the 
Army, and finally stopped altogether. 
The Army was in the pink of condition 
and eager for another battle, and I dare 
say the powers that were running the war 
did not consider it desirable that their 
morale should be affected by the antici- 
pated possibility of an early peace. About 
the middle of August the peace signs 
seemed so strong that Barry and I had 
half a mind to leave the Army and return 
to Japan, just as nearly all the few re- 

107 



108 NOGI 

maining correspondents that had been at 
the front that summer had already done. 
We decided to go down to Moukden and 
see if we could there get any idea as to 
how the negotiations were proceeding in 
America. When we had left the railroad 
the previous May, the country had been 
bare and brown, with scarcely a spear of 
green to enliven the somberness of it all. 

r 

But three months had passed, and when 
we rode into Tiding in August, the sun 
and the rain had done their work upon the 
face of the land and turned it into a very 
paradise. Acres upon acres of the tall 
kowliang, or millet, bent and swayed be- 
neath the soft breezes of summer, like the 
waves of the sea; poppies, with their bril- 
liant red blossoms, onions and other vege- 
tables were planted everywhere in acres, 
wlierever little patches of timber dotting 
the plain showed where the Chinese vil- 
lages nestled in the shade. The millet 
reached ten and fifteen feet in height, and 



NOGI 109 

in many places where we took short cuts 
through the narrow trails that wound 
through the grain, it seemed as though we 
rode through miniature forests, which mur- 
mured above us, scattering upon our 
clothes the dust of the fine pollen of the 
plants. As we approached the railroad, 
the signs of activity became more and more 
apparent, and the indications of peace 
seemed to us to be more remote. The 
country had been active three months be- 
fore, but now it was humming with the 
industry of a great beehive. Trains were 
coming up from the South at the rate of 
one each hour, and every one was of the 
maximum length and loaded to the guards 
with the raw material of war. The rail- 
road yards at Tiding were filled with long 
lines of cars, around which buzzed and 
hummed the cohorts of the Japanese coolie 
soldiers. Car after car we saw, covered 
with the dull leaden gray tarpaulins, which 
protected the countless tiers of boxes con- 



no NOGI 

taining ammunition for the small arms, 
while strings of box-cars loaded with food 
and Red Cross supplies were being emptied 
of their contents every hour. Train after 
train came puffing in. First an artillery 
train, with flat-cars in the front, loaded 
with the guns, fresh from Japan, and in 
the rear the box-cars with the men and 
horses of the organization. " Truly," we 
thought, as we sat in our train, headed for 
Moukden and the grand headquarters, 
" President Roosevelt and the peace nego- 
tiators have failed at Portsmouth," for in 
eighteen months' association, off and on, 
with the Army, we have seen no such signs 
of preparations for a great battle. On 
the platform of one of the stations on our 
way South we met a Japanese officer who, 
after the first commonplaces of greeting, 
asked us what we thought was ahead of us, 
"Peace or War?" Of course we knew 
nothing and could only ask him the like. 
What did he think? " Ah," he said, with 



NOGI 111 

a shrug of his shoulders, " soldiers do not 
think. They can only obey orders. We 
only know that both armies are preparing 
for the greatest struggle of the war. We \ 
are moving more troops than ever before. • 
Thousands are coming to us daily, and we 
hear that there are thousands more waiting 
for ships in the Inland Sea towns. Of 
course we soldiers prefer to fight, for that 
is our profession, but there may be peace," 
and he sighed deeply. We spent three 
days in Moukden as the guests of Oyama, 
Kodama and the officers of the general 
staff, but we got no information there, only 
shrugs of the shoulders and " Ah, we do 
not know, but we strongly urge that you 
return to the front very quickly. You 
may miss something most interesting." 
Kodama himself, the chief-of-staff, who at 
the early stages of the war had used his 
entire influence to keep the correspondents 
in the rear, was especially urgent. " We 
do not wish that you leave us," he said 



112 NOGI 

again and again. " In the early months 
of the war we have made great mistakes 
in the treatment of the journalists. We 
now recognize that they are very useful 
in a war. We cannot tell if there be peace 
or not, but we think it would be very un- 
wise if you go away." Oyama, with many 
" Ohs " and " Ahs " and polite little bows 
and pleasant little smiles, was of the same 
mind. All this, of course, did not lead us 
to believe that peace was imminent, and 
so we returned at once to our Fakumen 
headquarters. For a week we sat quietly 
in our bean-mill and watched the activity 
that surged and beat about us. The days 
of mere drills were passed. No longer 
did we see Nogi sitting quietly in his com- 
pound or nursing his sword in his lap as 
of yore, when he spent his evenings alone 
on the roof of his house, watching the 
mountains in the moonlight. No more were 
we invited to teas, dinners and " chit-chats." 
Now when we passed his compound, we 



NOGI 113 

saw only strings of horses being walked 
up and down by orderlies, while hardly a 
day passed that some general of division 
or brigade did not visit the Commander 
from the extreme front, where we were told 
the soldiery were working like demons on 
trenches and advanced gun positions. 
Every day we saw Nogi, usually on horse- 
back, with his staff. Always he saluted 
us politely, but now it was the Nogi of 
Port Arthur that we saw again, and not 
the Commander that had laughed and 
joked with us at our Fourth of July dinner. 
; That subtle change from an army at rest 
to one in the travail of preparation for a 
great struggle was felt in every town and 
village that we visited. A few days after 
our return from Moukden we began, away 
off on our Western flank, to get new troops 
from the rear. First there came the 
Eleventh Division, fully 25,000 strong, 
counting its reserves. We never knew it 
was on its way until we saw its General 



114 NOGI 

and his staff (whom we had known at 
Port Arthur) ride into Fakiimen one day. 
The next and the next and the next day, 
for a week, we sat on the roadside beyond 
Fakumen, and while our horses nibbled 
contentedly at the grass, we watched the 
soldiers of the Eleventh pouring North, 
regiment after regiment. Now, too, we 
began to get more artillery, and battery 
after battery jingled through our little 
town on its way to the front, while every 
road was traceable, for miles, by the cloud 
of fine dust that rose above the marching 
of many feet and the rolling of artillery 
and transport wheels. By the last of 
August it was clear to all in Fakumen that 
peace negotiations had failed, for did we 
not each day see increasing preparations 
for war? At last came the news that the 
Fifteenth Division, a new one fresh from 
Japan, was on its way to join us. That 
settled it in our minds, and Barry and I 
at once decided that we would make a 







O 3 



2h 



NOGI 115 

final trip along the front and get the lay 
of the land before the storm broke. So, 
with just our saddle horses and one serv- 
ant, we rode forward to our left front, 
where lay the Seventh Division of 203 
Metre Hill fame. If we had had any 
doubts before about the coming of a big 
action, they vanished here. The first night 
we sat at a banquet, given for us by Gen- 
eral Osaka, its commander. Some thirty 
officers from his command sat down to the 
board, and I do not recall ever having 
attended a similar dinner, where the guests 
were more carried away with enthusiasm 
and the lust of battle. Eyes flashed and 
voices rang, as toast after toast was tossed 
off to the coming combat. Again and 
again we were invited to come to the 
Seventh and share with them the great 
conflict. It was long after dark when we 
left the table for our quarters, and through 
the dimness of the night-shadows we met, 
even at that late hour, a regiment of 



116 NOGI 

cavalry (the Nineteenth, I think it was) 
that had ridden forty miles that day and 
was just going into camp for the night. 
Barry and I talked long after we were 
under our blankets, and worked out our 
plans for the next weeks, which we figured 
would be spent entirely in the saddle. The 
next morning early we pushed still farther 
to the front and to the West, where we 
took lunch with the commander of the 
cavalry. Here, to our surprise, we learned 
that nearly the entire cavalry of the whole 
army in Manchuria was spread out. Al- 
most 15,000, so we heard, were lying on 
the extreme left flank ready for the great 
turning movement, it seemed, Nogi was 
then planning. Here at lunch with the 
general of cavalry was the same fever 
of enthusiasm that we had seen the night be- 
fore. Here again were toasts drunk and in- 
vitations showered upon us to come and live 
with them during the battle. And here we 
heard it reported that already on the far, 



NOGI 117 

far Eastern flank, some 180 miles away, 
the Imperial Guards Division was advanc- 
ing, and that the first shots had been fired 
between the outposts, or, as one young 
officer expressed it, "Yes, oh! already our 
Imperial Guards, they are making shoots at 
the Russian outposts." Every one seemed 
to feel that two days at most would see 
the general movement fairly under way. 
We had intended to stay longer at the 
front, but now, assured in our minds of 
immediate action, we decided to return to 
Fakumen and make our preparations for 
the battle. 

\It was about forty miles back to our 
headquarters, and we rode gaily through 
the dust, turning out every few minutes 
to let batteries and transport trains pass 
us on their way to the front. I have 
never before or since seen such an un- 
broken string of guns, cavalry, soldiers and 
munitions as I saw that day we rode back 
to Fakumen. Our hearts fairly sang with 



118 NOGI 

excitement. After four months of waiting 
we were going into action at last. All the 
way back we were arguing and discussing 
plans for the next month. Barry wanted 
to go with the Ninth Division, but I leaned 
strongly to the Corps Artillery, since that, 
being well toward the base where lines of 
information would converge, would not 
move forward until the strategic point in 
the operations was reached. We were still 
debating the matter as we rode through 
the old gate, on the Mongolian frontier, 
and entered Fakumen. Tired we were, 
and covered with dust an eighth of an 
inch deep, when we pulled up in front of 
our bean-mill in the old familiar compound. 
As I threw my bridle to one of our serv- 
ants, a Japanese orderly stepped out of 
the shadow and handed me a telegram on 
the Japanese charactered blanks of the 
Field Wire. I tore it open and read it. 
The date line was Tokio. It was from my 
agent in Japan and contained one word. 



NOGI 119 

But that was enough. It simply said 
"Peace." I handed it to Barry and he 
read it over too. 

We looked at each other in dumb amaze- 
ment. 

The war was over. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THUS it came about on the very eve 
of what would have proved to be the 
most stupendous battle in history, that 
peace fell upon Manchuria in the month 
of September, 1905. And, strange as it 
may seem, it fell almost as a blow upon 
the entire Japanese Army. Every man and 
every officer that I talked with was eager 
for what all looked forward to as a con- 
flict that would finally wipe out hopes of 
a Russian supremacy in the Far East for 
half a century to come. No one seemed to 
count the cost of either lives or money. 
All were only too anxious to make the 
sacrifice, be the cost never so great. In 
view of the vast preparations which we 
had seen and which even that moment were 
still at full tide, we could not at first believe 
the news that had come to us. But late 

120 




tl. 



y. 

sx 



.2 r 

v. " 

.—I ^-> 

^ i 



1-1 t^ 

4j •<J 



NOGI 121 

that night the correspondent of the London 
Times came around to see us, and in his 
hand he held a cable from London ordering 
him home from the " front." We sought 
out the staff and with glum and sour faces 
they admitted that the news was only too 
true. We pleaded with them to tell us the 
terms of peace. In their gloomy visages 
we read deep and bitter disappointment, 
though of the details we could learn noth- 
ing. One young officer volunteered, with 
an oath and a flush of rage, the startling 
comment that he hoped Komura would be 
assassinated on his return to Japan. This, 
from one who had never before expressed 
a definite opinion before us, was very sig- 
nificant. And then the next day it began 
to leak out just what the terms of peace 
were. No indemnity and only half of 
Saghalien Island! These were the par- 
ticular points that the Japanese could not \ 
swallow. I remember telling the terms of \ 
peace to a Japanese cavalry sergeant whom j 



122 NOGI 

I met on the road. He had lived in San 
Francisco before the war, and spoke Eng- 
lish fluently. When I explained to him 
as much as I knew of the result of the ne- 
gotiations, he stood like one in a stupor 
for nearly a minute. Then he snatched his 
hat from his head and dashed it to the 
ground and burst into a torrent of in- 
vectives in Japanese. At last he said in 
English: " If what you say is true, we 
have been betrayed. Our brave soldiers 
have been sold out. But we here at the 
' front ' will never permit it. We will 
recognize no such treaty. We will fight on, 
and we will beat the Russians, peace or no 
peace." As for Nogi himself he was bit- 
terly disappointed. He withdrew to his 
house and saw no one, the staff giving out 
the report that the General had been taken 
suddenly ill. We pressed for further in- 
formation, but were curtly informed that 
he could not be seen; that he had a severe 
disturbance of the eyes. Perhaps he had 



NOGI 123 

for ail I can say to the contrary, but the 
word that passed among us was that Nogi, 
who had been able to stand, without turn- 
ing a hair, the sacrifices and distress that 
the war had entailed, had not been able 
to swallow the disappointment of so much 
spent and so little gained in the treaty of 
peace. I think there was not a man in 
the Army that dreamed of the possi- 
bility of no indemnity or of giving up a 
foot of the newly-occupied Saghalien 
Island! We were bent on leaving for 
Japan the very next day, but a sad aide 
waited on us with a note from headquarters 
advising us that though Nogi himself could 
not be present, yet he wished us to par- 
take of a farewell banquet to be given by 
his chief-of-staff in our honor before we 
departed for our homes. 

The dinner was held in due time, and 
Ichinohe presided. It was very complete 
and very fine indeed. Many kinds of food 
and more kinds of drink were served. 



124 NOGI 

The Osaka band, just outside the banquet- 
room, played its liveliest airs. Various 
members of the staff made stiff little 
speeches, and Ichinohe himself said a few 
halting words of farewell. But it was far, 
far different from the dinner we had sat 
down to a week before, at the Seventh 
Division headquarters. No suppressed ex- 
citement here; no eager invitations to be 
present at the coming action. The battle 
had been fought — at Portsmouth, — and, as 
the Japanese felt, hopelessly lost, while 
they who were eager to pour out their very 
hearts' blood were obliged to sit in bitter 
acceptance and reconcile themselves as 
best they might to what had befallen them. 
They sat eating and drinking stolidly, 
barely exchanging words with us or with 
one another. The dinner was almost over 
and we were eating fruit and drinking 
liqueurs, trying to keep up a pretense of 
conversation with our sad-eyed hosts, when 
the door was suddenly thrown open. For 



NOGI 125 

a second no one looked up, and then in 
an instant every man in the room was on 
his feet, and standing at rigid attention. 
(In the door stood Nogi, blinking a little 
at the light, and with an expression of sad- 
ness on his face I shall never forget. He 
was without his boots and without his 
sword. His feet were thrust into Japanese 
slippers, and his black military coat was 
open at the throat. He had on no collar, 
and the first two buttons of his white shirt 
were open, disclosing the sinewy muscles 
of his brown neck. He did not smile at 
all, but walked slowly around to the head 
of the table where we sat, and shook us by 
the hands. Then he spoke sharply in 
Japanese to an orderly, who placed a gob- 
let of champagne in his hand. Once more 
he turned to us, and with a gentle look in 
his eyes, those sad, sad eyes, he said some- 
thing as follows: "I have not been well, 
and so it seemed that I could not be at 
this dinner. But as I sat alone in my 



126 NOGI 

quarters it seemed right that I should step 
in and say a few words to you men of the 
press before you leave us. You gentlemen 
[referring to Barry, Ricarlton, who had 
just joined us, and myself] were with my 
army at Port Arthur. That none of us 
will forget. So we cannot let you go with- 
out a word of farewell; yet will we not 
say farewell itself. Let our friendship 
ever be like the stars that fade in the dawn, 
though lost to sight, yet none the less 
present. We see you not and you will 
not see us, perhaps, yet will we each know 
that the other somewhere is living and 
thinking of us." Then he raised his glass 
and silently we all drank. Then he turned 
to his staff and called, with a little of his 
old fire, " Banzai! " and the men answered 
as ever. Three times that old shout rang, 
and then once more the General shook us 
by the hands and, as quietly as he had 
come, walked to the door. He turned for 
a moment and stood looking us over, and 



NOGI 127 

then, with a little smile, he brought his 
hand to a formal salute, turned abruptly, 
and was gone. 

And this was the last glimpse we had of 
dear old Nogi. 

'We had intended starting on the long 
ride to Tieling at daylight, but, just as we 
were mounting, an orderly asked us to 
call at headquarters at seven o'clock. We 
rode around there on our way out of the 
town and in the compound found old 
Ichinohe and half a dozen of the staff 
awaiting us on horseback. The chief-of- 
staff saluted us formally and then, through 
an interpreter, he said, " We will accom- 
pany you part way on your journey toward 
the East." And so in the crisp, frosty air 
of the early morning we rode along the 
winding street of old Fakumen toward the 
Eastern gate. The day was like a Sep- 
tember day in North Dakota, or in the 
valley of the Danube. There had been a 



128 NOGl 

sharp frost, and the rays of the sun, still 
copper red, were just coming up behind the 
range of hills. Every blade of grass stood 
out sharply in the early sunlight, with the 
frost rapidly turning to drops that shone 
like diamonds. As we swung out over the 
old bridge, the Osaka band, standing just 
beyond the gate and hidden from our vieW 
until we were upon it, struck up Sousa's 
" The Stars and Stripes Forever," with all 
the brass and the ardor that its forty con- 
stituent parts could produce. I think I 
never heard it played better. For a mile 
we rode down the road until we reached 
the outskirts of the town. Ichinohe 
stopped, and the little cavalcade came to 
a halt. " The Japanese," he said, " are 
loath to say good-by to their friends. So 
we will not say farewell. I will sit here 
upon my horse, with my staff about me. 
You will ride to the bend in the road. 
When you reach it, you will turn and 
look at me, and I will wave my hands 



NOGI 129 

to you, and you will wave your hands to 
us, and that shall be our last farewell." 
So we rode off down the roads, our hearts 
heavy and our eyes not quite dry, for we 
had come to love those old soldiers with 
whom we had lived for so many months. 
It was fully a mile to the point where the 
Fakumen road to Moukden led into the 
little defile, which wound its way East- 
ward. We turned, when we reached it, 
as we had been bidden, and there, barely 
visible in the distance, stood the group of 
horsemen. We waved our hands, and in 
return there came from the figure on the 
great black horse a white flutter. It was 
Ichinohe waving his handkerchief. 

And thus, after many months, we took 
our leave of the Third Imperial Japanese 
Army. 



CHAPTER XIV 

OF Nogi, after the war, I shall say 
little. He returned to Japan to re- 
ceive all the honors which his Imperial 
Master and an appreciative nation could 
confer upon him. Of these it is not neces- 
sary to speak; suffice it to say that higher 
tribute no man received after the war, not 
even excepting Oyama himself. When the 
Emperor of the Island Empire died, Nogi 
was conspicuous among the mourners. But 
none of the thousands that watched that 
immobile face at the dozen ceremonies that 
marked the occasion dreamed of what was 
going on behind that mask or of the dread- 
ful intent concealed beneath the grave and 
quiet face. It had been planned that when 
the body of the Mikado left Tokio on the 
special train for its burial place, the fact 

should be announced by the booming of 

130 



NOGI 131 

artillery. Nogi withdrew to his home, and 
with the first report he quietly cut his 
throat, and the spirit of the last of a long 
line of the Samurai of his race slipped 
away to join that of his departed Master. 
To us, far off in America, the deed seems 
a dreadful one, but to those who knew Nogi 
and understood a little of his ideals and of 
his simple worship of his Emperor, the act 
seems not strange, but almost natural. 
There can be little doubt but that his own 
desire for life went out when his two sons 
were sacrificed on the altar of the nation 
at Nanshan and at Port Arthur. That 
Nogi himself cared anything for the per- 
sonal honors that were showered upon him, 
none who ever knew him could for a mo- 
ment believe. His whole life was simply the 
personification of the duties which his ideals 
set before him. From them, either in war 
or peace, he never wavered. After the war 
it seemed his lot to perform certain high 
functions in the Army and in the State; 



132 NOGI 

he performed them patiently and faithfully. 
He owed his allegiance to his Imperial 
Master, and when that Master's death 
came there was no longer any obligation 
to live, and so, without a tremor, Nogi cut 
his throat and died. Perhaps, deep in his 
heart, he felt that by his death he might 
kindle anew in Japan the idealism of the 
older days, sullied a little by contact with 
the Western civilizations. In any event, 
his life stands out as a unique example of 
a man who did not flinch from any hard- 
ship or from any danger. He accepted all 
without complaint and valued life only that 
it might serve the object in which all his 
loyalty and duty seemed centered. To 
Nogi, the Emperor was the personification 
of Japan itself, and when he finally gave 
his life for the Emperor, it was also for 
Japan. His work seemed done, and he 
yearned for the peace and quiet long de- 
served and long overdue. 

That such a man with such ideals could 



NOGI 133 

live in this day and generation surprises 
those of us who are accustomed to the hfe 
of the Western world. We see great men 
spring up, reach high office and the goals 
of ambition, but usually the idea of self 
lurks somewhere within the shadow. We 
see great patriotism too, but who, in the 
last generations, can show a record of de- 
votion, suppression of personality and an 
idealism that can equal that of the old 
Japanese Samurai? We read of such men 
in the ancient days of Grecian grandeur. 
But they lived in a far different environ- 
ment. Here we have a character whose 
later life was passed amidst the turmoil 
of a great modern industrial nation. Yet 
in and through it all he was the same old 
Spartan. He could use, as his tools, the 
best that civilization had to give, but 
neither national glory nor personal ambi- 
tion could turn his iron heart from the 
cherished principles of ancient chivalry im- 
planted by his father. In his heart, deep, 



134 NOGI 

deep beneath the surface, the flame of the 
idealism of ancient Japan burned with 
never a flicker. Consistent, faithful, true, 
he had one thought: his duty to his Em- 
peror and to Japan. And consistent, faith- 
ful and true he died, leaving a lesson that 
should not fall on barren soil. Even we 
of the West, in the midst of our tumultuous 
pursuit of wealth, position and reputation, 
may well pause and think for a moment of 
just what such a man as Nogi represented. 
To Japan he is the vindication of a na- 
tional ideal. To the rest of the world it 
should be an inspiration to know that men 
still live who can cast off the mantle of their 
personality and concentrate their lives upon 
an attempt to realize a benefit outside 
themselves, a good that affects a whole 
nation, and, when this is achieved, can 
willingly, gladly and simply die. 
/ But as we think of Nogi, the Spartan 
/man, let us not forget the Baroness, the 
xSpartan woman, who, when her husband 



NOGI 135 

chose his end unflinchingly, elected to join 
him in death by Hari-kari, the traditional 
method of suicide of the Samurai. We 
Americans, in honoring Mrs. Straus, who 
preferred to die with her husband on the 
sinking Titanic, must feel a like reverence 
for the frail highly-bred little Japanese 
woman, whose fiber and ideals were no less 
heroic than those of her soldier husband. 
She was a worthy mother of worthy sons. 
We may seek far in the annals of history 
and not duplicate the story, the last chap- 
ter of which was written in Tokio in Sep- 
tember, 1912; the story of a mother, a 
father and their two sons, who lived stead- 
fast and true to the ideals of their fathers 
and remained to the end loyal to the blood 
of the ancient nobility that flowed in their 
veins. 

The West cannot perhaps sympathize 
with the spirit that prompts a man to com- 
mit suicide, yet we must judge the great 
Japanese general from the point of view 



136 NOGI 

of his religion and his traditions, and not 
from that of our own standards. So judged 
he must be accorded a unique position, not 
as the captor of Port Arthur, nor as the 
hero of Moukden, but as a simple man who 
lived only for the performance of duty, 
and for the realization of ideals inherited 
from centuries long since passed. 
Nogi was such a man. 



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